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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






















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Thought Germs: 

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FOR THINKERS. 


BY 


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R. F. Judson 



KALAMAZOO: T . \V , \\ 

1884. Y _ 




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THE LIBRARY 
OR CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 


H. H. EVERARD & CO., 

BOOK AND JOB PRINTERS,. 

KALAMAZOO, MICH. 








—“Words are things; and a small drop of ink, 

Falling, like dew upon a thought, produces 

That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.” 

— Byron. 


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1884, 
By R. F. JUDSON, 

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 





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INDEX: 


PAGE. 

INTRODUCTORY__ 11 

FOR CANDID CRITICISM_-____ 13 

WHAT W T E ARE IN RELATION TO THE INFINITE__ 16 

A MISTAKE WE MAKE__ 17 

HOW GOOD AND EVIL ACT_ 17 

THE NEAREST APPROACH TO A PERSONAL GOD_ 18 

NO CREATION_ 19 

INDIVIDUALITY_ 19 

INFINITE SPIRIT, INFINITE LIFE, INFINITE MATTER, 

INSEPARABLE_ 20 

OUR ORIGIN IS IN CONDITIONS_21 

THE VALUE OF THOUGHT _ 21 

THE HIGHEST PERSONAL INTELLIGENCE_ 22 

BIRTH AND DEATH_ 23 

NO ORIGIN OF SPECIES___ 24 

THE TRUE RELIGION_ 25 

SOULS___ 26 

SPIRIT AND MATTER_ 27 

SHALL WE PULL DOWN OR BUILD UP?_- 27 

ALWAYS SOMEWHERE_ 28 

PRIESTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT___«._ 29 

THE CHAIN OF BEING_ 30 
























VI 


INDEX 


PAGE. 

THE CREED OF THE FUTURE_ 3t 

THE RELIGION OF TO-DAY_ 32 

LIFE—_ 33 

PREACHERS_ 35 

LOSS OF PERSONALITY_ 36 

FORMS OF LIFE INFINITE_ 37 

THE EXISTENCE OF A GOD__ 38 

WHAT TO WORSHIP_ 39 

THE MAN, CHRIST JESUS_V- 40 

LIFE AND DEATH_ 40 

THE PATRIOTIC DUTIES OF THE PRESENT_ 41 

A COMPARISON_ 42 

A MANIFESTATION OF TRUE RELIGION_ 42 

PRAYER_ 43 

WORSHIP_ 43 

THE ELECTRO-MAGNETIC FORCE_ 44 

THE HERO_ 45 

AMBITION_ 46 

CIVILIZATION — BARBARISM_ 47 

SCIENCE AND RELIGION_ 48 

THE TRUE RULE OF LIVING_1_ 50 

WHAT MAKES THE MAN?_ > _ 51 

THE BIBLE_ 51 

RELIGIOUS REVIVALS_ 52 

EQUALITY OF ALL MEN_ 53 

LIVING HERE, AND HEREAFTER_ 53 

A GRAVE QUESTION_ 54 

A FUTURE STATE_ 55 

AMBITION_ 57 

PUBLIC MORALS_ 57 

OUR HOMES_ 58 

THE DISCOVERIES OF THE FUTURE_ 59 

GENIUS_ 60 

HONEST OR DISHONEST_ 61 

BUSINESS SUCCESS_ 62 

OUR HOME-LIVES_ 62 

WOMAN_ 63 

MAN_ 64 

LAKE MICHIGAN — NIAGARA_ 65 

NAPOLEON THE MAN OF THE AGE_ 66 

THE HIGHEST RULE OF RIGHT IN A GOVERNMENT_ 67 

YESTERDAY, TO-DAY, AND TO-MORROW_ 67 












































INDEX 


Vll 


THE CHILDREN_ 

FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW_ 

THE ANTIQUITY OF THE GLOBE_ 

UNIVERSAL LAW__ 

ELEMENTS OF LIFE_ 

OUR BOASTED COMMON SENSE_ 

POLITICS AND THEOLOGY_ 

THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE_ 

THOMAS CARLYLE_ 

THE ONLY PARADISE FOUND_ 

DOES ASSASSINATION ASSASSINATE ? 

THE BEST MEDICINES_ 

SELFISHNESS__ 

SCIENCE KNOWS NO WASTE_ 

THE WORLD IS OLD___ 

EVERYBODY KNEW IT BEFORE_ 

METALS ONCE ATOMS IN THE AIR_ 

IDEAS_ 

POLITICAL PARTIES_ 

BELIEF IN A GOD_ 

COL. INGERSOL — JUDGE BLACK_ 

SELFISHNESS DISHONEST_ 

INFINITY_ 

TRUTH_-_ 

LIBERTY IS OBEDIENCE_ 

IDLENESS__ 

EDUCATED FOOLS_ 

MEN’S PROPER BUSINESS_ 

PRIDE_ 

MIND_ 

THE INFERIOR MAN_ 

THE SUPERIOR MAN_ 

GREAT MEN_ 

IMIGINATION___ 

GREATNESS_ 

PENETRATION_ 

HUMILITY_ 

METAPHYSICIANS_ 

MATTERS OF SIGHT- 

WRITERS_ 

THE SUPERNATURAL- 

BOOKS_ 


PAGE. 

68 

— 68 
69 

— 70 

— 71 

— 72 

— 73 

— 75 


78 
_ 79 
_ 81 
_ 81 
82 
85 

_ 88 
_ 90 
_ 92 
_ 93 
_ 96 
_ 98 
_ 103 
_ 104 
_ 105 
_ 106 

- 107 
_ 108 
_ 110 
_ Ill 

112 
_ 113 
_ 114 
_ 115 
_ 116 

- 117 
_ 118 
_ 119 
_ 121 
_ 122 
_ 123 
_ 124 
_ 125 












































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4 4 • 

Vlll 




INDEX. 


PAGE. 

UNGENTLEMANLINESS_•_127 

ENJOYMENTS_____:_ 128 

CHARITY_131 

TRUTH AND TERROR___1_._133 

VULGAR LUXURIES_ 134 

PRIDE—_135 

HAPPINESS IN WORK__..._136 

PATRIOTISM_ 140 

HEROES — INVENTORS_•_ L42 

NATIONAL PRIDE_145 

THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS_146 

NOT EGOTISM___ 148 

AUDIENCES_I_ 148 


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TO THE 

MANY THINKERS, 

WHO HAVE HELPED HIM 
TO THINK, AND WHOSE THOUGHTS 
MAY BE HEREIN EMBODIED, 
THE AUTHOR WOULD 
EXPRESS MANY 
THANKS. 






Introductory. 

THESE pages are submitted to the judgment and 
candid criticism of mankind. Fame is not thus sought, 
but the desire is to inspire thought. 

A man may write as with a diamond pen, dipped in a 
fluid of electric light and be misunderstood. His words 
must perish. Mere words must perish and be forgotten. 

A pyramid may be erected that shall stand for un¬ 
counted ages; yea, while the ages crumble. The pyra¬ 
mid must fall at last. The thought of the thinker and 
builder will travel on to surprise and instruct mankind. 
The thinker and builder as an individuality, may 
have long since passed into oblivion; but his thoughts 
remain. 

It is only as a force vibrating through the ages—a 
thought traveling with the eternal present, that man’s 
true immortality is conceived. 

Man’s individuality may be lost, his very being be 
forgotten, while his thought lives *on, and on, through 
countless cycles of being. 

Thought outlives the ages. 

Thought is undying. 

The thinkers are, and should be, our intellectual 
kings and rulers. 



THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


13 



MEN should speak what they honestly believe. 

Eight is of more value than creeds. 

Truth is to be sought above all things. 

Let us speak to the thinkers of to-day. 

We dwell in the infinite, the boundless, the eternal. 

What is infinite can never have been created. 

What is boundless can never have been established 
by a personality—by a figure, or person having bounds. 

It is easier to attempt to grasp the infinite, the 
boundless, than to conceive the finite,—that which has 
bounds, as creating the infinite, the boundless. 

Worlds, suns, and systems have always existed, will 
always exist. 

Ihe words “origin”, ‘‘creation”, as used to-day, 
mislead and bewilder. 

There has been no origin, no creation. There can 
Ee none. 

What we observe as new in phenomena, can be but 
modifications in the order of the infinite. 

Monads and men, atoms and worlds, suns and sys¬ 
tems are born, mature and decay, and are succeeded by 


v 


14 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


the new , born of tbe old , as age succeeds age in the order 
of the infinite. 

What is called origin or creation, is only the emula¬ 
tion of something from something. It is birth from that 
which has birth already. It is but another manifestation, 
in the endless order of life and manifestation. 

Emenation and absorption are the order of the 
infinite. 

The absorption of the old is necessary to the emena¬ 
tion of the new. Such is the order of development that 
is being constantly presented to our eyes. With minds 
unclouded and intelligent, we cannot fail to perceive 
this. 

Infinite spirit requires an infinite dwelling. 

Infinite atoms, infinite suns, and infinite systems 
constitute that dwelling. 

The infinite includes the evil and the good. It in¬ 
cludes what is called religion , and irreligion , and all modi¬ 
fications and exhibitions thereof. It includes all things. 

Man, as the highest intelligence included in tlie 
infinite, makes the distinction between the evil and the 
good—the positive and the negative, and as lie chooses to 
serve the one or the other, secures to himself happiness 
br misery. 

The triumph of good or evil in this world depends 
not upon an overruling, personal God; but depends upon 
the ruling, personal man — ruling as he does by the 
exercise of his inborn power to choose the good or evil 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


15 


of the infinite—the positive or the negative, and thus 
give character to his being. 

The problem of the triumph of good or evil in this 
world, will never be solved, only as man solves it. It is 
under his control. Heaven and Hell must be of his 
making. 

I am something—a man—as a man, I am a part of 
the infinite. 

No part of the infinite can ever become nothing. 

All life is one life. 

All life is the infinite life. 

All death is the same death. 

All death is but the entering upon new life. 


16 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


What We are in Relation to the Infinite. 

INFINITE goodness attends ns whenever we, by 
thought and act, invoke it. If we fail to summons its 
attendance, it then, to us, becomes infinite evil. 

Neither infinite goodness nor infinite evil is a per¬ 
sonality only as we, in ourselves, make it such. Neither 
is either an image in the form of anything. 

The all-comprehending infinite, in building up and 
pulling down, for evil and for good, is an all-pervading 
force or principle, living within us and without us, active 
for happiness or misery, as we may make it active. 

We thus become accountable to ourselves, and to 
each other, as the highest living embodiments, or or¬ 
ganisms, that in any degree control this infinite force or 
principle. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


17 



A MISTAKE that superficial thinkers of to-day fre¬ 
quently make is, in insisting that the less comprehends 
the greater — that the personal comprehends the im¬ 
personal—that the finite comprehends and includes the 
infinite. 

Right living can never be based upon such an irra¬ 
tional conception of an overruling power. Really 
thoughtful men must be driven from the fellowship of 
those holding such an idea of our relations to the in¬ 
finite, rather than drawn towards them. 


low Good and Ivil let. 

GOOD and Evil are inseparably acting in the order 
of the infinite. 

Serve the good, and peace, contentment, good-will, 
gladness and happiness will be our lot. 

Serve the evil, and unrest, discontent, ill-will, un¬ 
happiness and misery will attend us. 

Our experience teaches us this as respects what we 
call time. 

Analogy, the revelations of nature, in us, and around 
us, teach us that the same must be true as respects what 
we call eternity. 

Eternity is but unbounded time. 


18 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


\ 


f he Nearest Approach to a Personal Sod. 

THE highest manifestation of genius in man is the 
nearest approach to a personal God that will ever be 
witnessed in the universe. 

The idea of a personal God was born in the mind of 
ignorance, as it witnessed the achievements of transcend¬ 
ent genius, for which it could not account. 

Infinite spirit and infinite matter were thus lost sight 
of; and, therefore, to-day we have learned to clothe in¬ 
finity as a personality. We have learned, in our thought, 
to include that which is without measure, in that which 
is circumscribed—giving, an image of the mind, infinite 
control of the unmeasurable—taking an idea, measured 
its a person, for the impersonal. 

The all-pervading, actuating force or principal, can 
by no possibility be solely included in a personality, but 
must, of necessity, and in its own order, include all per¬ 
sonalities. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


19 



TO create, in the sense of to produce from nothing, 
is inconceivable, impossible, and an absurdity 

Neither the infinite of matter, nor of sj5ace, could 
have ever been created. 

In no sense whatever, can there have been a creation 
of the spiritual or material universe. 

To create implies a beginning. 

Infinite implies without beginning or ending. 

As the infinite is without beginning or ending, so all 
that which is included in the infinite as a part thereof, 
is without beginning or ending. 

No atom was ever created. 

No atom can ever be lost. 



INDIVIDUALITY is subject to constant modifica¬ 
tions. It is not absolutely the same from one moment to 
another. 

Our present, conscious individuality, becomes at 
length merged, and lost in immortality. 

Out of the immortal proceeds the new immortal. 

The new immortal will be purer and better, as the 
individual immortal of to-day is pure and wise. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


20 


Infinite Spirit. Infinite life, infinite Matter, 
Inseparable. 

INFINITE spirit inhabits infinite matter. Spirit 
and matter are inseparable. United, they exhibit all 
forms of life, all phenomena, animate and inanimate, as 
witnessed in the heavens above, and the earth beneath. 

Infinite spirit, as inhabiting infinite matter, actua¬ 
ting and energizing it, gives birth to infinite conditions. 
Conditions thus born furnish the avenues through which 
enter upon our view all forms of life, from the incom¬ 
prehensibly great to the incomprehensibly little, from 
systems of worlds to systems of matter—from man to the 
monad. 

This is no mere speculation. It is demonstrated 
before our eyes every day of our existence. Appre¬ 
hended or unapprehended, it is the basis of all so called 
religions and creeds of mankind. Man’s origin is thus 
clearly and consistently accounted for. All phenomena 
becomes less a puzzle as we question it, and is resolved 
into a problem as to the workings of the infinite. 

In view of this truth, systems of theology become 
interesting as a part, a manifestation, a modification of 
the infinite in thought. 

Man can study the infinite from this stand-point, 
and, seeing himself included therein, escape the mani¬ 
fold perplexities that beset him in his allegiance to 
creeds, and thus open a broader way to a new life, for 
science and for man. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


21 


Our Origin is in Conditions. 

CONDITIONS characterize the infinite. The in¬ 
finite exists in conditions only. With the requisite con¬ 
ditions, the perfectly organized, but incomprehensibly 
small of insect life, is born. With a modification of 
conditions, an animal, huge with life and motion, leaps 
upon the earth. Again, as the conditions are changed, 
man, the supreme glory of the infinite, appears. 

Infinite atoms occupy infinite space. Under modi¬ 
fied conditions these atoms unite and form a meteor 
shooting through the sky; or a comet blazing through 
space, or worlds and systems of worlds moving for 
uncounted ages in their orbits, awaiting new modifica¬ 
tions of conditions, which shall resolve them into suns, 
and from suns to atoms of light, from atoms of light to 
meteors and comets, from meteors and comets to systems 
of worlds, and from systems of worlds to suns again. 


THE thought finding utterance through the man is 
of more value than the man himself. 

The thought may live for uncounted ages. The man 
must die—must become absorbed in his surroundings 
from whence he came—must thence enter upon new 
forms of life. 


22 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Who Highest Personal Intelligence. 

THE highest known personal intelligence, is man. 
In the unfolding of his reason, he has reached the point 
where he sees himself the subject of happiness, or unhap¬ 
piness, as he may choose. 

No fact teaches us more than this—no observation 
has recorded anything beyond this. Priests, prophets 
and apostles can go no further than this. There is no 
enjoyment but in the present. “To-morrow will never 
rise or set.” 

By moulding his life to truth, goodness, sweetness 
and strength, the personal man may realize all there is 
of happiness. Moulding his actions to the base, the evil 
and the vile, a man may, and must be, wretched through 
every day of his existence. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


23 


Birth and Death. 

BIRTH is the emanation of the personal from the 
limitless ancl impersonal—it is the moving forwards, it 
is the manifestation of unfailing force that has* in the 
past, and will in the future, ever continue to move us. 

Death is merely the losing of our personality—the 
entrance upon new being in the fields of boundless being 
—the moving onward in the true life. 

Birth and death are necessary to each other. With¬ 
out the one the other could not be. 

Neither should be counted as terrible. Philosophy 
recognizes both as events in the unending march of 
events. 


t 


24 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


9 

No Origin of Species. 

MEN, animals, and all things, past, present and 
future, have existed, do exist, and must exist in the 
infinite. 

As the infinite has no origin, so that which is a part 
of the infinite can have no origin. All are part of the 
unoriginal. 

There can be no origin of atoms, of species, or of 
worlds. The heavens above and the earth beneath say 
this. 

Instead of using the term original as applied to 
the phenomena of nature, we should learn to look upon 
all phenomena as manifestations and exhibitions of the 
action of infinite matter, pervaded and actuated by infi¬ 
nite force. 



THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


25 


the true Religion. 

THE religions, so called, of the world have been 
mainly, wherever found, negative, rather than positive 
manifestations of the infinite. They have been opposed 
to true education, have retarded the progress and devel¬ 
opment of mankind, and have been the direct cause of 
the cruel wars that have reddened the world with blood, 
and made it ghastly with death. 

The search for scientific truth is the only true relig¬ 
ion. In the positive manifestations of the infinite as dis¬ 
closed by science, is found the wise up building—the true 
work. Upon this basis all true and real progress must 
be made. Its Scripture is the only Scripture, the study 
which is worthy the mind of mankind. 


26 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Souls. 


THE souls that have been are our souls of to-day. 

The souls that are to be are the souls of the present. 

Our souls are not the individual souls of the past. 

The souls of the present will not be the individual 
souls of the future. 

Soul, as apprehended in ourselves, is the subtlest 
manifestation of the infinite. 

Soul belongs to the unbeginning and unending. 

When it ceases its individual manifestation, as in 
ourselves, it returns to the infinite soul-fountain. Indi¬ 
viduality is lost. 

Soul emanates from, and becomes absorbed in, the 
infinite soul source or fountain. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


27 


Spirit and latter. 

THERE is no whole, no bounds, no beginning and 
no ending to what is called spirit and matter. 

By spirit, we mean the actuating force of matter— 
that which dwells in it, impels it, is a part of it, is never 
separate from it, and which is from everlasting to ever¬ 
lasting. 

The boundless, the incomprehensible lie before us 
and arouiid us—lie within us and inspire us. Of these 
we learn more and more as day succeeds day, and as we 
move onward and upward in the order of development. 
But of these we can never know the whole, within the 
circle of these we explore but narrowly. 


Shall Wc Full Sown or Build Up? 

MAY we not properly question ourselves—whether 
it is not about as safe to pull down present systems of 
thought and teaching as to build them up? Whether 
our worldly affairs, which we call human, are not, after 
all, akin to the devilish? Whether, what we call organ¬ 
ized effort for the public good, is not an organized 
deformity? Whether, our present guides and rules of 
living, are not teaching the race to be systematically bad 
instead of recklessly so? 

Would it not be about as well to rattle around in 
chaos as in organized cussedness? 


28 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


ilways Somewhere. 

“WHERE would I have been had I never been 
born 1 ?” 

Such was the question of an interesting child of six 
years. 

We echo the question — where ? and we answer— 
evidently somewhere, 

All there is of the loving and lovely child to-day 
would have been somewhere even though she had never 
been born. Rot as a congregation of the same atoms I 
now see before me would she have existed, but as enter¬ 
ing into unnumbered congregations of atoms and in¬ 
telligences. Not as an individual would she have been 
identified, but as included in the elements entering into 
and constituting countless combinations and beings on 
every hand. 

The act, the conditions through which her life has 
been invoked, may be followed by another act, by new 
conditions, through which she shall disappear from our 
view, become absorbed in her surroundings, and thus 
enter upon a new life, in which the present will be lost 
and forgotten forever. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


29 


friests of the 



testament. 


THE New Testament knows nothing of any mere 
human priest, except among the Pagans and Jews. 

Who ridiculed Isaiah? The insulting priests of 
Judah. 

Who smote Jeremiah? The Priests of Pashur. 

Who threatened Amos ? The priest Amaziah. 

Who would have torn Paul in pieces ? The priests 
of Jerusalem. 

Who killed St. James ? The priest Amos. 

Who crucified Christ? The priests Annas and 
Caiaphas—lawful priests, observe, and acting in spiritual 
tribunals. / 

It thus appears that priests, like other men, only 
usually in a more extreme degree, are prone to indulge 
in injustice, cruelty, persecution, and murder. 

Priests, as such, cannot be infallible guides. The 
highest rules of living are not exemplified by priests. 
“Love your neighbor as yourself” was never born of 
priestly brain or lips. 

Priests are born of their environments. Their pro¬ 
fessional character is the curtain by which they blind the 
ignorant. 

Back of priests lies the truth, which must yet make 
mankind wise, priests possibly included. 


30 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


the Chain of Being. 

IT would seem that the chain of our being runs 
somewhat as follows : 

Bitumen and sulphur form the link between earth 
and metals. 

Vitriols unite earth with salts. 

Crystallizations connect salt with stones. 

Amianthus and tylophitas form a kind of tie between 
stones and plants. 

The polypus unites plants to insects. 

The tube-worm seems to lead to shells and reptiles. 

The water-serpent and eel form a passage from rep¬ 
tiles to fish. 

The Annas Nigra are a medium between fish and 
birds. 

The bat and flying-squirrel link birds to quadrupeds. 

And the monkey gives the hand to the quadruped 
and the man. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


31 


the Greed of tt|c Future. 

THROUGH the clouds of what is called Christianity, 
mankind is to-day groping blindly upward and outward 
towards the luminous and true. 

The time will come, however, when the clouds will 
be less dense, when the creeds, the bigotry and supersti¬ 
tion of the present shall join the mythologies, the 
idolatry and superstition of the past. 

The world’s creed must at last be formulated by 
Science, and be in perfect harmony with its facts and 
demonstrations. 

If so-called Christianity furnishes the best known 
aids to progress to-day, let us look for truer, better and 
more consistent aids in Science to-morrow. 

Through mere faith, mere fiction,—the worship of 
the ideal,—is not found the broad highway of human 
knowledge and human progress. 

Facts must constitute the foundation of the creeds 
of the enlightened nations of the future. 

In the demonstrations of true Science may be found 
the only illumination that can elevate mankind. 


32 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


He Religion of fo-iag. 

THE religion of to-day is but a modified form of 
Paganism. It is the worship of an image, born of man ? s 
imagination, instead of an image carved by his hand from 
wood and stone. Therein only is the difference between 
so-called Christianity and Paganism. 

The great infinite fact is as yet but dimly appre¬ 
hended by man^ His attempted conceptions of the infi¬ 
nite are usually merged in the merely finite. 

While he preaches of the infinite, in sermon, symbol 
and psalm he shows us that he worships the personal— 
the finite—that he bows to the limited rather than the 
limitless—to the image of something rather than to the 
all-pervading presence. 

When will mankind unlearn Paganism % 

When will he learn to worship the infinite—the im¬ 
measurable—the true ? 

Not until man consents to clear his perceptions. 
Not until he dares to recognize the truth, no matter what 
the effect may be on present faith. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


33 


life. 

LIFE is, all pervading, active or latent. 

It is never distinct from matter, but pervades it 
from the tiniest atom at the earth’s center to the tower¬ 
ing mountain on its surface—from the smallest asteroid 
or planet, to the measureless suns and systems. 

As active, it is the motor in all motion. 

As latent, it holds in its grasp all that is inanimate, 
all that is called death, or dead. 

It circulates from the animate to the inanimate, and 
constantly dwells in both. 

At one time it clothes with the form of death that 
which has just worn the garb of life. 

And then the thrill of life enters and animates the 
inanimate and dead. 

The laws of this life we shall never be able to learn 
in their full and perfect operation. 

This life principle makes all forms of being akin to 
each other, and connects them by links visible and invis¬ 
ible. 

It makes all forms of what is called death, but the 
gateway to new being. The tiny atom and the massive 
world may change, and the change may employ an in¬ 
stant, or uncounted ages; yet the infinite life dwells in 
all, and will resurrect and re-resurrect all, forever and 
forever. 


34 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


This unfailing life shall yet take each atom at the 
center of the earth and bring it to the surface thereof— 
bring it to the pole—set it to the thinking and speaking. 

It will, too, take the active, the animate of to-day, 
and carry it to the earth’s center, whence in the march 
of ages it shall come to the surface again. 

Life has its individual manifestations, but is an all- 
pervading force. 

We cannot escape from life. 

The entire problem of being is here. 

Let scientific research be made upon this basis. It 
is unimportant that it be harmonized with what are # 
styled orthodox dogmas. 

Let the world be illuminated with truth, no matter 
on what shore dogmas and creeds may be wrecked. 

Wisdom is the heritage of mankind. It is man’s 
by right. His happiness in his relations to his fellow 
man depend upon his succession to this heritage. Hon¬ 
esty requires that it be delivered to him. Let fiction 
and dishonesty be banished. Let us cease charging the 
follies and crimes of humanity upon a cruel, inconsis¬ 
tent and mythical Creator. Let each man and woman, 
learn, that he and she alone, is responsible to himself or 
herself, and to the spirit of life within each, for his or 
her happiness or misery. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


35 



THE preachers of the day are but short-sighted, falli¬ 
ble men. Many of them yet need to be made wise to fit 
them for any important purpose. They are shackled by 
creeds which cunning and superstition have drawn up 
for Churches, and with selfish aims and ends. 

The so-called religions are mainly the outgrowth of 
the ignorance and laziness of the “ Called and sent.” 
They are but so many evidences of the necessity of a 
nearer acquaintance with truth and goodness, for truth 
and goodness sake. 

“Holiness bands ” are a delusion so far as true 
growth is concerned. Their practices are degrading. 
Their galvanic batteries of massed humanity disgust 
honest people, and drive them to a society by them¬ 
selves. 


36 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


loss of Iorsonalitg. 

THE loss of personality is not an extinction of life, 
it is only the true life. 

Our personality is daily changing. Life moves on 
forever. 

We speak of places where are no forms of life. It 
is a blind remark. 

The infinite is pervaded with life. 

If there is a place without life, then the infinite is 
not—the spirit—everywhere is a blanque—then thought 
is not thought—then we are naught. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


37 


forms of life Infinite. 

LIFE exists in conditions. In the order of the infi¬ 
nite, conditions are infinite. 

Therefore forms of life are infinite. 

In the order of the infinite, conditions are constantly 
changing. 

Forms of life appear, are reproduced, and continue 
to survive, only so long as the conditions under which 
they originate, remain. 

As conditions change, the specific form of life disap¬ 
pears, or becomes modified, so that it never again appears 
as precisely the same. 

Conditions are the order of the infinite. 

Conditions are constantly being modified infinitely. 

Abstractly, infinitude is alone unchanging—it always 


remains. 


38 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


the Existence of a God. 

WHAT we call God is an ideality. An idea, while 
it may be recognized in name as emanating from 
what is thought of as spirit, as not material, is really 
known only in connection with the material. 

God, so-called, pervades the material universe—per¬ 
vades infinitude—is the infinite—is not a personality. 

The spiritual, the God, the infinite, ever act together, 
and never separately; for the reason that what we call 
God—that which is the infinite, combines and includes 
the spiritual and the material—the inseparable. 

An idea is something. 

The idea of God, of the infinite, is conceived be¬ 
cause the infinite is. 

Materiality exists, because the thought, the idea, 
the infinite exists in it. 

The measure of our happiness depends upon our 
conception of the infinite, and of ourselves as a part 
thereof, holding the problem of happiness in our own 
hands. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


3J> . 


What to Worship. 

IF men desire to worship, let them worship the 
great, all-pervading, actuating force, that dwells in all 
space and in all things—that moves in the breeze and 
blossoms in the trees—that sits high upon the lofty 
mouhtain’s top, where the naked granite glitters like 
gold in the sun, where the storm-cloud broods and the 
thunder-storms crash—that moves down, low down in 
the deep valleys, where the fountains murmur and the 
rills sing—that weaves the many-coloFed iris, the seraph 
zone of the sky—that stirs the mysterious depths of 
ocean—that holds the planets and all stars in their 
places—that conducts the endless systems of worlds in 
their pathways—that breaths life into all that lives, and 
that in its positive and negative action produces and 
manifests to us all phenomena conceivable by man 


40 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


file Man, thrist Jesus. 

THERE never has been, is not, and never can be, a 
physical or spiritual manifestation but that which is the 
subject of the all-pervading force—the impersonal infi¬ 
nite, that is at work unceasingly building up and pulling 
down, organizing and disorganizing, giving life and tak¬ 
ing it away—that is changing the now life, to new life. 

The Superior man, Christ Jesus, was a subject, a 
manifestation of this force, as all mankind are subjects 
and manifestations thereof. 


\ 


life and Death. 


LIFE and death are but the constant resolving of 
atoms, actuated by force, into new forms of life and 
activity. 

Death, so called, is but the going away from the 
present life, into a new life. 

Life may be called the positive manifestation of 
force, and death the negative. 

One is necessary as the complement of the other. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


41 


the fatriotic Duties of the Present. 

“WE should be, not merely politicians, but should 
seek to discover the patriotic duties of the present, and 
also their relation to the future. We should endow our¬ 
selves with that large discourse which looks before as 
well as after; learning lessons which go before, as well as 
those which belong merely to the past.” 

k “We should guard against those centralizing ten¬ 
dencies which are now laying a strain along the very 
fibres of our free institutions; and we should carefully 
guard against that destruction of municipal liberty 
which the tendencies of to-day fearfully jeopardize.” 

Also, let us remember, that so long as human nature 
and passions remain as now, the preservation of the 
civil and military power of the government are both 
essential to the prosperity of the nation. 

The patriot of the present should be pure and fear¬ 
less. 

Pure rulers make a pure people. 

A people true to themselves will insist upon honest 
rulers. 


4 


42 


THOUGHT GERMS FOE THINKERS. 


I Comparison. 

U A FORM of light—a center of irradiation—a crater 
vomiting rays—the tire of a brilliant wheel—an asteria 
enclosing the disc with its silver tentacles—an enormous 
eye filled with flames—a glory carved from Pluto’s head 
—a star launched by infinite force.” 


i Manifestation of true Religion. 

THE love of goodness for goodness’ sake, looking 
for no reward beyond that which such goodness brings, 
is the highest manifestation of any possible religion. 

The goodness that follows a fear of punishment of 
misdeeds, is dishonest, unreliable, and serves mankind 
and truth only while the fear remains. 

Such goodness has no power which should save a 
human being here, or can save him hereafter. 

If a Hell were possible, the serving of goodness for 
fear of punishment would be but traveling the high-road 
to Hell, the way, possibly, being a little more private 
than by the broad way. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


43 



PRAYER can never be answered by one unchange¬ 
able from all eternity. 

What is fixed by such a being cannot be changed in 
answer to prayer, no matter whether the faith with which 
it is uttered be as a mustard seed or as a mountain 5 no 
matter how sincere the heart that utters it. 

Prayer should be addressed to the principle of good¬ 
ness existing in the intelligence of mankind, and it will 
then receive an answer from that intelligence. 

Every act of a man’s life is a prayer, either for 
good or for evil. 

Prayer, addressed to a mythical and unchangeable 
personality, is a vanity and a mockery. 

Live so as to serve purity, goodness, truth and jus¬ 
tice, and thy life shall be prayer and praise together, and 
the end of thy living be fully answered. 



WORSHIP all things. 

Worship the all-pervading force. 

Worship the infinite, and you shall be worthy the 
name of a worshiper, rather than the name of a pagan. 


44 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



ATOMS, worlds, suns and systems are controlled, 
directed and held in their places by the infinite, un¬ 
ceasing, ever-acting electro magnetic force. 

Perpetual life, perpetual motion, perpetual growth, 
perpetual decay, unceasing cycles, dwell in this force. 

This force balances all things—all things, con¬ 
stantly changing, exist in this force forever. 

We say perpetual motion resides in this force. The 
observed heavens declare it, the earth beneath us pro 
claims it. 

Man can never invent perpetual motion. He may 
by inventing conditions where this electro-magnetic 
force is unbalanced, and continues unbalanced, run ma¬ 
chinery, properly constructed in relation to such condi¬ 
tions, until the machinery wears out. 

This electro magnetic force holds infinity in per¬ 
petual balance, and preserves it in perpetual motion. 

By availing ourselves of unbalanced conditions, we 
may produce motion that will continue as long as such 
conditions remain. The motion will be the result of the 
effort of said force to restore the equilibrium 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


45 


the Hero. 


“THE hero, as usually recognized, is a man of 
one idea, who achieves his aim with a magnificent disre¬ 
gard of legitimate means!” 

Napoleon was a man of one idea, that one, the 
aggrandizement of himself. All other considerations 

f 

were subordinate. 

Wellington was a man of broader culture, and of 
many ideas relating to the welfare of the human race, 
rather than to himself alone. 

We worship Napoleon as the hero, while we forget 
his conqueror. 

Napoleon we remember because he equals the 
greatest of Homer’s ideal heroes. 

Wellington we forget because he fails to meet 
Homer’s standard. 

In other words, we are so much nearer barbarism 
than true enlightenment, that we prefer the false to the 
true, admire the less rather than the greater, and show 
that with all our boasted progress we bow to the might 
of force and injustice, rather than to the might of intel¬ 
lect, coupled with justice, and guided by a love of com¬ 
prehensive democratic principles. 

The greatest man is he who fully recognizes his 
right to equality with his fellow man, and aids in lifting 
all men to one common equality. 


46 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS, 



WHAT is ambition realized ? What is fame ? Alex¬ 
ander the Great conquered the world, then wept that he 
had no more worlds to conquer, and died in a drunken 
debauch. 

Hannibal scaled the Alps and awed Imperial Rome, 
yet he died by his own hand—a suicide. 

Julius Caesar won the height of his ambition, and 
decked his brow with the crown of the world’s greatest 
empire, and was then stabbed to death by his most 
trusted friend. 

Napoleon the First, the greatest military genius of 
all time, and once Emperor of France, died, alone and 
forsaken, on a deserted island. 

What a mockery is mere human greatness! 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


47 


G ivilization==B arb arism. 

CIVILIZATION is artificial. 

Barbarism is natural. 

A perfect democrat recognizes the right of no man 
to rule over him. He accepts no lawgiver. He owns 
willing obedience only to that law whose enactor and 
subject is himself. 

A perfect democrat should be perfectly good, per¬ 
fectly wise, and perfectly honest. 

Were human nature perfectly wise, good and honest, 
a perfect democracy would be possible. 

With human nature naturally barbarous, and its 
higher culture and civilization the result of legal enact¬ 
ments and artificially applied rules, a perfect democracy 
is impossible. Indeed, until human nature is radically 
changed, a true democracy can exist only in name, not 
in fact. 

The nearer to a perfect democracy we attain with 
human nature remaining as it is to-day, the greater the 
chances for our degeneration into barbarism. 

The highest civilization that can be reached with 
human nature remaining as it is to-day, will be found 
under a strong and arbitrary form of government, where 
the head is wise, temperate and just. 


48 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


icicncG and Religion. 

SCIENCE is the study of nature and the observing 
and recording of facts residing in nature’s bosom. Na¬ 
ture may be termed the storehouse of science. He that 
would be learned must search this storehouse, and the 
more keenly he searches, the richer will be the records 
and rewards of his labor. 

The truly scientific man will fearlessly meet the 
facts in nature as he apprehends them, and taking them 
to his understanding, will carry them with him along the 
journey of life as the basis of his physical and moral 
actions. 

True religion is the fearless recognition of all facts 
in nature that relate to man’s moral and physical being, 
and the applying of such facts to every-day life, making 
use of the useful and rejecting the unworthy, no matter 
where found, whether in the Bible, in sermon, in psalm, 
or in the records of the Scientist. 

True Science and true Religion ever go hand in hand 
together. There can be no conflict between them. 
What is frequently called religion, but what is really 
mere ignorance and blind superstition, is ever in conflict 
with true science. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


49 


The older religions can never harmonize with sci¬ 
ence. They are not founded on facts as they exist in na¬ 
ture and are recorded in connection with the observa¬ 
tions of scientific men. 

Science is the search for all physical truth. 

Religion is the search for all moral truth. 

The search in both cases should be conducted with 
the one object, of realizing the fact—the truth. 


50 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


the true Rule of living. 

THE true rule of living is to do what is for man’s 
best under the circumstances of the present—is to do 
right to the best of our knowledge, without aiming at 
securing reward, and without fear of punishment. 

What is right? 

This we shall never know perfectly. 

We do know what is meant by doing as one would 
be doue by. 

Lying, stealing and murder are harmful to us. 

We hate lying. We despise thieving. The mur¬ 
derer we abhor. We should therefore neither lie, steal, 
nor murder. 

By the cultivation of our reason, our intelli¬ 
gence, we may learn more thoroughly the true standard 
of right. 

Whatever is right we should seek to apprehend, no 
matter what prejudices it violates, what creeds it may 
overturn, or what revelation it may prove false and 
worthless. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


51 


What lakes the Man ? 

THE person, the figure, the pretensions of a man are 
of minor importance. 

The thought, the conceptions, the life, make the 
man. 





THE Bible, like all other books, is one of the mani - 
festations of the infinite. It comes to us, as do all books, 
through man as the agency, the medium. 

Like any other book, whatever it contains of truth 
and right, we should approve. Like any other book, 
whatever it contains that is absurd and false, should re¬ 
ceive our disapproval and condemnation. 

We should follow truth, no matter what present be¬ 
lief it may overthrow. When we dare to do this we 
shall become truly receptive, and stand in the light of a 
day that shall make us wiser and better as the race 
moves onward. 


52 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


leligious Revivals. 

EELIGIOUS revivals, so-called, and excitements, 
are hurtful and demoralizing, being an insult to wisdom, 
and a mockery of intelligence. 

The imposing of a gigantic personality, in the form 
of a man, upon the credulous and the ignorant, threat¬ 
ening them with dire penalties at his hands unless they 
forsake some fancied or real wrong, is in no degree re¬ 
moved from the barbarism that ruled the nations before 
science and the schools were known. 

Eeligious revivals, so-called, serve the evil of the 
infinite rather than the good, the negative rather than 
the positive, and are in violation of the calmer wisdom 
and better judgment dwelling within us. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


53 


Equality of Ill 


THE equality of all men before the law can only be 
maintained where there is an equality of education and 
natural intelligence, where human passions are so trained 
as to become thoroughly obedient to the understanding. 

No provision of law can make men equal in the en¬ 
joyment of the privileges it confers. 

The stronger, and more intelligent, will always se¬ 
cure to themselves privileges, which those of weaker 
physical and mental endowments fail to realize. 

The thinkers are the kings. 

The unthinking are the subjects. 

The unthinking can never be made the equals of the 
thinkers before the law, for the reason that they are not 
equally capable of the enjoyment of the boon it confers. 

The thinker is entitled to greater privileges than the 
unthinking. The one, acts with sight, the other, blindly. 

A The first should be relied on, to act under the law 
with a careful regard to its healthful provisions. The 
latter, acting independently, is as likely to wreck a na¬ 
tion as to save it. 

living iere, and lereafter. 


THE better we live here, the surer we are of a higher 
existence hereafter. 


54 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


A Grave Question. 

IT is a grave question, and one which every think¬ 
ing man should seek to answer for himself,—whether the 
supreme authority in a state ought to be intrusted to the 
majority of its citizens? 

Must not institutions, purely democratic, sooner or 
later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both? 

Is not the Federal Constitution a sail with no 
anchor? 

Will not the time inevitably arrive when some des¬ 
pot, some Cresar or Napoleon, will seize the reins of 
government with a strong hand, and rule the people as a 
matter of necessity, and to prevent absolute anarchy? 
And should such time never come, will not our Republic 
yet be as fearfully plundered and laid waste as was the 
Roman Empire in the fifth century? 

There may be this difference, however, the Huns and 
Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from 
without. The Huns and Vandals who shall ravage our 
Republic will have been engendered within, born of the 
freedom of our institutions. 

The only safety for our Republic is for the leaders 
to lead correctly. If they do this, who will dare not to 
be correct? 

Let the manifest desire of the leaders be for what is 
good, and the people will be good. A hundred years of 
good government by pure leaders would transform the 
bad and render punishments unnecessary. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


55 



WE frequently hear the ignorant and bigoted declare, 
that we know nothing of a future state, only as it is re¬ 
vealed to us in the Bible; as though the writers of that 
book were divinely inspired to communicate the fact of 
our immortality to us. 

Nothing can be more absurd than such a declaration. 

Unnumbered peoples have inhabited this world of 
ours, and believed in a future existence for themselves, 
who never heard of the Bible. 

The writers of the Bible are entitled to no more 
credit as being inspired in stating the great fact of our 
ceaseless being than is the Indian, “who sees behind the 
cloud-topped hills an humbler heaven.” 

The writers of the Bible only stated what had 
been recognized by the mind of man ages before the 
Bible was written. 

Neither the statements of the Bible, with all its 
claims for inspiration, nor that of the Indian who makes 
no such claim, affects the great fact one way or the 
other. 

Man was immortal, and believed in his immortality, 
before Bible, Koran, or Creed was thought of. Bible 
writers have made him neither more nor less immortal— 
nor have they added to his faith in immortality. 


THOUGHT GEE MS FOR THINKERS. 


50 


The Bible may strengthen the faith of the bigot in a 
future existence for himself, but not of the thinkers. 

We are immortal because there is no beginning and 
no ending of the infinite—because no part of the infinite, 
either of spirit or of matter, can ever be destroyed—and 
because spirit and matter can never be separated. Not 
that spirit is always associated with the same individual 
organization of atoms, but that the spirit of man is but 
a part, an emanation of the all-pervading spirit. 

The orthodox claim of inspiration, for the statement 
in the Bible that we are undying souls, establishes 
nothing. 

The Hindoo, in the exercise of his faith in a here¬ 
after, is as much entitled to the credit of being inspired, 
as the writers*of the Bible. 

But the question of inspiration is an unimportant 
one. Grant that either, or both, the Bible writers and 
the Hindoos were inspired or uninspired in their ideas 
of futurity, yet we must consent, at last, that no inspi¬ 
ration can change the great facts relating to our being, 
here or hereafter; no matter whether the claim comes 
from an orthodox priest, or an unorthodox savage. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


57 



AMBITION can tread no loftier heights than those 
where love and truth reside. 

Purity and humility wear nobler crowns than those 
of emperors. 

Blended sweetness and strength in human character, 
shine radiant as the heavens, and outlive the ages. 


fublic Morals. 

GOOD public morals are a demonstration that vice 
is pain, and virtue pleasure. 


5 


58 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Our tomes. 

IF, as custodians of homes, we cannot talk without 
uttering bitter, accusing words, better, far better, that 
our lips be sealed in silence. 

We should make the words used in our homes, kind, 
conciliatory and soothing, and thus bring restfulness, 
peace and happiness to those who dwell therein. 

Let us, in our homes, as much as possible, learn to 
attract each other and not repel. 

Keep hearts and tongues with all dilligence, for out 
of these are the issues of all that makes home lovely and 
heaven-like. 

The individual, state and nation, should study the 
art of conciliation rather than the art of war. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


59 


file SiscoYGries of the future. 

THE great and marvellous discoveries of the future 
will he in the fields of magnetism, or of the electric 
force. 

The wonders yet to be revealed in connection with 
this subtle and incomprehensible element, will exceed 
anything now dreamed of, or known. 

It will eventually become the great motive power in 
all mechanical operations. 

When the genius of man, which is but a manifesta¬ 
tion of the same force, shall have measurably made it 
subservient to his will, then the science of aerial naviga¬ 
tion will have been solved—the secrets of the external 
earth will be better understood, from pole to pole, than 
at* present—the changes of the seasons will be more com¬ 
pletely understood and provided for, by man and sci¬ 
ence, and a remedy found for all diseases that afflict man¬ 
kind, that will relieve the human race from the quackery 
of pretenders, and the nostrums of those who claim to be 
the anointed healers. 


60 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Senius. 

OBSERVATION teaches us that genius is born 
with the individual, and is never acquired after birth. 

While education may mould and direct genius, in¬ 
spiration is its soul. 

All the colleges and universities in the land cannot 
originate one genius. 

All books cannot make one fact. 

All facts cannot make one philosopher. 

While facts are the basis of all true philosophy, 
genius, in its apprehension of the same, must make them 
valuable to mankind. 

While books are gratifying to the poet, yet it is his 
genius that gathers, as by inspiration, the thoughts of 
the ages, and brings them, in new books, to cheer with 
song the traveler and pilgrim. 

Facts belong to genius. 

The universe is strewn with unending facts. 

Genius gathers facts, as electric flowers, and present 
them to mankind as fit food for daily life. 

Genius is rarely found, and when found, is not 
always recognized. 

Genius may be leaned upon as the only reliable 
agency for the world’s advancement in true enlighten¬ 
ment. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


61 


Honest or Sistjonest. 

HONEST or dishonest!—that is the question. 

The methods of conducting the business relations of 
men would imply, to a superficial observer, that it is of 
little importance whether a man be one or the other, so 
long as what is called worldly success crowns his acts. 

The unsuccessfully'honest business man may go 
down under reproach, while the dishonest but successful 
speculator may be crowned with honor, may be courted 
and caressed even while engaged in his dishonest prac¬ 
tices. 

Often we see the dishonest but successful man 
assume to act as the custodian of the honor and manhood 
of the truly honest man, while the very presence of the 
former is a pollution and a crime. 

Humiliation and defeat often overtake the truly 
worthy. 

Honor and success often wait upon the shrewdly un¬ 
principled and dishonest. 

Wise is the honest man, who, realizing these things, 
can dwell in a consciousness of his own merits, and seek 
no further confirmation of the same. 

Wise is the man, who, clothed in a true integrity, 
recognizes the sanction of the inner and better spirit or 
soul, that ever speaks approvingly or disapprovingly to 
the hearts of all men. 


62 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS, 



§ 


JllGGCSS. 


TO be a successful business man in the worldly 
sense, it would seem that the mental vision must be 
bounded by this life. 

A broader vision, one that embraces unending life 
beyond this of to-day, disqualifies man for the practice 
of the degrading details and drudgery that are necessary 
to what is called business success, or the mere accumula¬ 
tion of dollars and cents. 

To the soul that sees beyond this life—that catches 
glimpses of the eternal life, the tricks of traffic, the 
sharp practices of trade that are apparently necessary to 
worldly success, are recognized with abhorrence—are a 
waste of mind, a prostitution of powers. They reveal 
natures, in those practicing them, but little, if any, 
above the brutes that build not. 



“All that our hearts approve of wit, poetry, senti¬ 
ment and sense, we should endeavor to live in our daily 
home-lives.” 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


63 



WHO does not bow in reverence before a true and 
noble woman ? 

She is the natural guardian of morality and faith. 

The essence of her intellect is worship; the great 
element of her heart is love. 

She is like a voice from a mountain summit, suggest¬ 
ing an elevation far higher than ourselves. 

If not a poet, her life is a poem, and distinguished 
above all others by its intense womanliness. 

She is candid and amiable—her being has a tone of 
great and boundless generosity. 

She is never consumed by the desire of being witty, 
astute, or severe. 

Her instinct is genial, yea, and if not genius, yet 
verges closely on genius itself. 

As music awakens the meaning of poetry, so does 
the true woman round, and mellow off, and awaken the 
meaning of life. 


64 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



A NOBLE man is worthy to rule the world. 

He is strong, yet tender, brave and true. 

He is one in whom all can trust. 

He is self-reliant, independent in his manhood, ever 
true to his social and moral duties. 

He is one who humbly acknowledges his kinship 
with all that is. 

Again, a noble man is a man of true freedom, of an 
earnest love, and of a steadfast faith. 

He stands with his eye fixed in contemplation of the 
infinite, surrounded by an atmosphere of clearest light 
and serenest beauty. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


65 



LAKE Michigan, the parent—Niagara, the child. 

The first, the unmeasured strength of the measure¬ 
less infinite. 

The second, the bursting of a bubble. 

The first, whose waves 

Do surge, «‘tnd swell, and roar, 

Then dash and break upon the shore, 

speaks with a voice majestically deep and grand as the 
pulses of eternity. 

The latter leaps upon its way like a giant child, 
wantoning in its strength, yet being a mist beside its 
source. 

Both are great voices, inspiring us with an impulse 
to bow as in the presence of infinite strength. 


06 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


» 

“Napoleon the Man of the Age." 

YES, we call Napoleon “The Man of the Age,” and 
the evidences of the correctness of our statement are 
sixty thousand men lying dead on the plains of Italy, 
black with the smoke of gunpowder, and gory with 
blood, done to death by this “ man of the age,” that he 
might sit more firmly and securely on a stolen throne. 

And amongst these ghastly forms of murdered men, 
sits the genius of Italian liberty, weeping over the chains 
new-riveted, and her opportunity lost. 

Bah! and the piety of Divines sees much to praise 
in this Jupiter Scapih, this gigantic villainy, which goes 
up an unholy stench in the* nostrils of the intelligent 
and thinking lovers of the true and the just. 

“The Man of the age!” Yes, and the further evi¬ 
dences are a triumphant march over the bodies of forty 
thousand Frenchmen to the throne of France. 

Verily, it would seem that remorseless villainy needs 
but to be successful on a gigantic scale, to win the j)lau- 
dits of even the professedly Christian, as well as the 
wicked among mankind. 

When will humanity learn to distinguish between 
the true and the false? When shall we learn to bow 
before the humane, the just, the good, the pure? 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


67 


the Highest fule of light in a iovomment 

THE highest rule of right as relates to human gov¬ 
ernment is, to let the administrative power of the gov¬ 
ernment do the best that is possible under the circum¬ 
stances. 

Abstract rules of right are often radical in their 
source, and frequently impracticable in their character. 

Abstractly considered, radical ideas, no matter to 
what they may apply, are in their very nature despotic. 

As despotism always begets crime and villainy, so 
abstractly radical ideas, as applied to government, are 
often the parents of disorder and insurrection. 

The true thinker, the true friend of good order and 
a stable government, should be ever ready to rebuke the 
reformer, so-called, who insists upon reform by imprac¬ 
ticable methods. 

The true reformer is he who believes that the tri¬ 
umph of right and justice is to be secured only by an 
intelligent action in view of, and with reference to, the 
possibilities of the day and hour 

As liberty is never despotism, and as radicalism is 
always despotism, therefore if we would establish and 
perpetuate the one, we must repudiate and banish the 
other. 


YESTERDAY is as nothing. 
To-day is everything. 
To-morrow can never be. 


68 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



THE children—“ waves upon the sea of life.’ 7 

What a responsibility it is, this being instrumental 
in bringing into a present organized existence another 
human soul! 

And will that soul which you have invoked, that 
has thus been added to the great congregation of indi¬ 
vidual souls, take up life bravely, bear it on joyfully, 
and lay it down triumphantly ? 

And what an infinite number of unborn souls are 
yet waiting to be invoked, to be called! 

The sun beam, the moon beam, the star-beam, earth, 
sea and sky, are pregnant, waiting to furnish the world 
with new human existences, with new and uncounted 
souls. 

We are going, they are coming. 

Armies of souls have already come from, and re¬ 
turned to, the same realms. 

Down the cycles of the infinite future countless 
armies of humanity must throng and struggle, must 
come and go. 

The infinite is manifested here as elsewhere, dwell¬ 
ing in all, existing through all, and ruling over all. 

From the fid to the lew. 

DECEMBER 31, 1883. 

January 1, 1884. 

From the old year to the new. 

A mere dot on the page of eternity. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


69 


the Iniquity of tho Globe. 

AGGASSIZ makes this profound declaration, viz: 
“When a great discovery is first announced, the people 
say: ‘It is not true 5 ’ then, ‘It is contrary to religion;* 
and lastly, ‘Everybody knew it before.’ ” 

The question of the great antiquity of the globe has 
passed through these three stages. 

Thirty years of patient and incisivej'analysis of 
languages, and a careful interpretation of the record 
possessed by nature in the recesses of caves, mounds and 
tunnels of rivers and valleys, have occupied investiga¬ 
tors, until to-day it admits of positive demonstration, 
that man, by means of two factors, “hunger and love,” 
toiled from a state of absolute savagery, through a 
period of many more than six thousand years, to his 
present platform of comparative civilization, a civiliza¬ 
tion yet in its infancy, but carrying with it boundless 
possibilities for the future. 

Through these thousands of years, man has pro¬ 
gressed from the rude flint weapon as his highest art, 
and the cavern as his dwelling place, to a culmination in 
a Dickens and a Tyndall. 

With such fruits harvested as we are now realizing, 
the promise of the future of our race is inexpressibly 
grand, and is an immense incentive to those who live 
to-day, and whose intellectual growth has not been ar¬ 
rested, to press forward to new fields of discovery, and 
to new harvests of intelligence. 


70 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



I 


jaw, 


THE laws that govern this little speck of star-dust- 
called our world, are common to the more magnificent 
worlds scattered throughout the infinite. 

The laws of celestial mechanics, of gravitation, of 
light and of crystallography are the same in all systems 
as in ours. 

To the uncultured these things are indiscernable; 
but to the cultured, to the man of scientific training, 
w*hat would otherwise be inexplicable confusion beQomes 
order and fixed law. 

Science shows, not only that our world is like some 
others, but that all worlds are kin. 

Animals, vegetables and minerals, fleas and ele¬ 
phants, sea-weed and peaches, mackerel and man, were 
built of the same chemical brick, with a possibility that 
the vegetable may possess less phosphorus. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


71 


Elements of life. 

OXYGEN, one of the principal elements entering 
into vegetable and animal life, forms seven-eighths of 
water, one-fifth of air, nine-tenths of ourselves, and one- 
half of the total weight of all our rocks. 

Here are rich subjects for study, for thought. The 
mud and clay at our feet once constituted parts of animal 
organisms. 

Our limestone rocks were once walking the face of 
the earth, or exploring the depths of the sea, as living 
animals. 

All rocks known to us have been, and are, made up 
of animal remains. 

The thickness of some of these rocks is estimated at 
nineteen miles. 

These remains of animal life carry us into a past, 
whose age we can compute but approximately. 


72 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Our Boasted loipion § ei l SG - 

OUR boasted “common sense” is frequently non. 
sense. 

Let us prove it by common salt. 

Common sense does not recognize that the oceans 
are made salt by the fresh waters; but, by scientific 
methods of inquiry, it is made evident that the fresh 
waters carry salt to the ocean. 

Ro other revelation but that of Science shows this. 

The inspired (?) prophets and apostles, in their 
teachings, never seemed to comprehend this. 

To them, the simplest operations of nature presented 
an overpowering multiplicity of variety, that seemed to 
bar their way to a comprehension of the fixed laws of 
nature, and inspired them with ideas of the supernatural, 
and thus shut the gateway to intelligent and indepen 
dent thought. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


73 


Politics and Theology. 

WHILE politics and theology are recognized as the 
great agencies through which the world’s progress is 
achieved, still, does not the question remain—Whether, 
after all, they have not stood in the way of progress and 
human achievement? Whether technical skill, science, 
and capital, and freedom of investigation, would not 
have wrought out for mankind greater distinction in the 
arts and sciences, than have been achieved under the 
twin instrumentalities of politics and theology ? 

What is it that has constituted the foundation of the 
progress and commercial development of the civilized 
nations of the earth? The answer is — Freedom of sci¬ 
entific investigation, rather than theological dogmas, or 
theological and political organizations. Have not Eng¬ 
land’s and America’s greatness and prosperity been 
wrought out in spite of the shackles which politics and 
theology have thrown around them ? 

In the countries mentioned, the human intellect 
teems and throbs under the intensity of free brain-work. 

The past, fettered by theology, has never produced 
such giants of consummate intellectual massiveness as 
Watts, Tyndall, Darwin, Huxley, Morse and Edison. 


74 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINRERS. 


Theology is not too good to be dedicated to scientific 
truths. 

Scientific truth is too valuable to be subjected to the 
fetters of theology. 

Give us a race capable of realizing the truths which 
reside in nature’s forces, and we will yet develop on this 
planet of ours a fruitful manhood, practicing industries 
which shall make it, in its circumference and from pole 
to pole, a garden of intelligence, of which we can now 
form but a slight conception. 

Let those, then, who speak for mankind to-day, 
speak, not as partisans, not as theologians, not as citizens 
of one state or nation; but as scientists, and as citizens of 
the world. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


75 


the language of Nature. 

HAPPILY, the language of nature is one which all 
nationalities can interpret. 

It is a language written before the existence of any 
creed. 

For uncounted millions of years the inscription of 
this language has been going on, and accumulating on 
the rocks. 

They are life-records, telling us that for many miles 
in thickness they are the cemeteries of dead-life. 

Open one of these volumes of the infinite, and deci¬ 
pher the writing on a few of the leaves. 

The lowest rocks, and the earliest, as far as research 
has been made, are the Archsean. 

North of Superior they were forty-nine thousand 
feet thick; and in Europe they attained a thickness of 
ninety thousand feet—equal to seventeen miles; and at 
the very bottom of them, life and death have been busy. 

Here Eozoon, or dawn-of-life fossil, existed and 
decayed, and, with the wreck of continents which it then 
helped to build, now shows us that the work was done 
at the rate of one mile in twenty millions of years. 


76 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


The building of these rocks would then require a 
period of three hundred millions of years. 

Yet the life that did this massive building had no 
conscious intelligence. 

Not until the Silurian period had dawned, not until 
more than forty million additional years had passed, was 
the first introduction into this world of brains, which 
came with the vertebrates, the fishes. 

The world waited long for brains. 

Possibly it may yet wait during vast periods of time 
for the higher life and more conscious intelligence, that 
shall be manifested through the subtleties of that won¬ 
derful galvanic battery, that strangely susceptible organ¬ 
ism, the brain. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


77 


fhomas Garlylc. 

THOMAS CARLYLE was a man whose temper and 
generosity were the thieves of all that was otherwise 
worthy in him. 

He was a habitual hater of humanity in the gross 
and in its individuals. 

He saw no merit in any one but Carlyle. 

His judgment was the serf of his imagination. 

His imagination was diseased by egotism. 

His egotism engendered and fostered selfishness in 
his mental constitution. 

He was always in bad temper, and always ungene¬ 
rous. 

He invited people to enjoy the hospitalities of his 
home that he might note their foibles, and pitilessly 
satirize them. 

His friendship was but a bitter assault on those 
kinder and more humane than himself. 

His sharing of a neighbor’s hospitalities was but a 
plot to blow up that neighbor’s character. 

His Reminiscences show him a mean, selfish, egotis¬ 
tical traducer of the wisest and best of his time. 


78 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


His imagination and command of language only in¬ 
tensified his meanness. 

Wantoning in sneers, friend and foe alike received 
his lashes. 

His magnanimity was that of the remorseless gossip. 

His heart was barren of all that is calculated to ex¬ 
cite enthusiasm in others. 

His manliness was no more to be trusted than the 
loyalty of Sitting Bull to civilization. 

In his own words we may say of him, he is “ like a 
dim old lichened crag on the way side, the precise mean¬ 
ing of which, in contrast with any public meaning it had, 
you recognize with a kind of not wholly melancholy 
grin.” 



THE only Paradise that ever has been, or ever will 
be found, is that within a man’s own heart. It is where 
he makes it. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


79 


Does Assassination Assassinate? 

MAECH 13, 1881. 

Does assassination assassinate? Is the assumed 
divine right of kings fairly offset by the sic semper 
tyrannis of the people? 

Does the spirit of so-called reform with which the 
people claim to be inspired when they strike down the 
ruler, really reform? 

The Czar of Eussia, the Emperor Alexander II, is 
dead—struck down by the hand of the assassin. 

Is the world wiser or better for the act? 

While the Emperor has fallen, has a fetter dropped 
from a single human limb? 

Has any pernicious social system received a check? 

Has a better system than the present received a new 
impulse, or a new birth? 

The individual or the party that professes to bring 
about a reformation of society by means of assassination 
is acting under a fearful mental aberration. 

Magistrates are not holy institutions. They do not 
exist by the grace of any all-wise personality. If they 
did, that personality would be guilty of their crimes. 


80 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


But they do exist in the order of the infinite, as do 
those that slay them. 

Both exist as systems of society exist and oppose 
6 ach other. 

But does the wild and bloody work which each 
indulges towards the other, destroy ? 

Does blindness slaughtering blindness bring light? 

Bather, does not such action intensify darkness? 

Does it not rivet new fetters ? 

May we not look to see the action of the Nihilists 
mercilessly avenged? 

May not the class which has incited the murder, 
become the murdered? 

The reform sought by assassination is the reform 
which blind and bloody barbarism usually employs. 

Instead of freeing men, its legitimate result is to 
rivet new chains. 

Instead of elevating, it degrades humanity to the 
lowest depths of cowardly brutality. 

The law of sweetness and strength is the law of 
intelligence and love. 

It is this law observed, that builds up and enthrones 
a people in freedom and happiness. 

All methods of reform that are pursued in disregard 
of this law are a failure and a crime. 

Reforms sought through any other channel are 
sure to go backward. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


81 



“THE best medicines are pure air, bright sun¬ 
shine, water from the heavens instead of from the earth, 
moderate exercise with regular sleep, and simple food, 
like fruits, rice and potatoes.” 

Selfishness. 

NATIONAL selfishness, like individual selfishness, 
usually defeats its own ends. 

Selfishness is contrary to wise and beneficent law. 

If selfishness were banished from human nature, 
Avorkmen, laborers, the destitute and suffering, would at 
once realize an improvement in their condition. Strife, 
insurrection, hatred and error, would soon be banished 
from our communities. Peace, liberty, and security 
would be the sublime realization, the common good, of 
all classes. 

Man has the right to seek his own welfare, so long 
'as he does not infringe the rights of others. 


82 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Science Knows no Waste. 


SCIENCE knows no waste, no destruction of either 
matter or force, and no beginning and no ending. 

Analyze a ray of white light. 

In the ray of white light we find the presence of 
the red, yellow and purple rays, the chemical rays, and 
the heat rays. 

It is through this sun-force, this light, that all 
thoughts, all life, all forces, are elaborated. 

The colors found in a sunbeam have never been 
wasted. 

While they may not have always painted flowers, 
they have been stored away for timely use. 

In the far-off ages they were locked up in seams of 
coal, and, iftstead of being used in the fabrication of a 
flower, they were laid by, to be thence extracted in due 
time, as analine, mauve, or magents, or as fruit essences, 
or even flower aroma. * 

Examine the phenomena of the Nova Scotia Coal 
Field. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


83 


Here are fourteen thousand feet in thickness of coal¬ 
bearing rock subject to examination on the steep Bay of 
Fundy. 

Eighty-one coal seams are exposed to view. 

These eighty-one seams represent eighty-one ancient 
forests, eighty-one submergencies of the forests beneath 
the waters, eighty-one coverings of mud and sand, and 
eighty-one elevations above the waters. 

Here, evidently, a vast river once rolled and tra¬ 
versed a delta, land where now the Atlantic swells and 
roars. 

Millions of years before man was here, the sun was 
shining here. 

Then, as now, rain fell, and the rainbow spanned 
the heavens. 

Then the response to the sunbeam was vast forests 
of vegetation. 

Then the sunbeam had not been analyzed by fern 
and flower, and fern and flower were colorless. 

But the sunbeam finally finds its response to the 
work it was then doing in the gorgeous colorings of 
to-day. 

The sunbeam, which may be evolved from the lump 
of coal to-day, is the sunbeam locked in that same coal 
millions of ages ago. 

That sunbeam that so long ago was locked away 
for use, is now driving steamboats and locomotives, 


84 THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 

is warming hearths and homes, is painting exquisite 
landscapes on canvas, is, with the later sun-beam of 
to-day, guiding the races of the earth into all light, all 
strength, and all beauty. 

As at the beginning, so at the ending, we say, 
nothing is lost. 

Ending may mean beginning, in science, as in a 
sunbeam. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


85 



THE world is old ! The upheavals of iEtna declare 
it! The Channel of Niagara repeats it! The Grand 
Canon of Colorado has recorded it! 

HStna now rests on tertiary formations. 

These formations were deposited before iEtna opened 
through them her volcano, and piled up her eleven thou¬ 
sand feet of mountain above the level of the sea. 

She tells us, through the gospel of her eleven thou¬ 
sand feet of lava, poured out once in every sixteen 
centuries, how long a time it would require for building 
up her mountain to such an altitude. 

Niagara has “notched its centuries in the eternal 
rocks.’ ’ 

Estimating its recission at one foot a year, and 
thirty-one thousand years have been occupied in cutting 
its present channel. But, estimating it upon a better 
authority, and its recission is counted at eight and one- 
half feet in a century, which figures up three hundred 
and eighty thousand years. 

Here is a water record and a time record, written in 
stronger characters than those of the Pentateuch; written 
by inspired nature, rather than by uninspired and unscien¬ 
tific man. 


SG THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 

And yet, the record of Niagara is insignificant as 
compared with the Grand Canon of Colorado. 

Here, the water has worn a channel from three 
thousand to six thousand feet deep, for a distance of three 
hundred miles, and through the hardest of rock. 

If the conditions were the same they are to-day, 
as the work progressed, it has required one hundred and 
ninety-five millions of years to excavate the present 
canon. 

Yet this vast period of years doubtless represents 
but a small portion of the time really employed in this 
stupendous work 

These rocks were built up before the excavation 
began. 

The water record and time record of this canon show 
us,' that the one hundred and ninety-five millions of 
years belong to comparatively recent geological times. 
They simply give us a hint of the portion of unending 
time employed. 

The valleys of the world are records that point to 
an age compared with which six thousand years are u a 
particle, a speck of time.” And while carbonic acid gas 
and water are acting as giant quartz crushers on the 
mountain sides, and the continents are thus incessantly 
wasting and being borne to the deep recesses of the 
ocean; still new continents are being built by millions of 
little workers; and, as the old becomes worn out and 
over peopled, the new shall rise in beauty for use and 
enj oyment. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


87 


The world is old, but nothing is wasted. The old is 
the foundation of the new. The old is ever disintegra¬ 
ting that it may be incorporated with the new. 

No atom is ever destroyed. 

Forces expended in one direction are reproduced in 
another. 

The world is old, and yet it is ever new. 


88 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


“Everybody Know it Before!" 

“EVERYBODY knew it before!” Such will soon 
be the cry of theologians and inventors of creeds in 
respect to the new thought of the age. 

And this new thought of the age has made, and is 
making, terrible ruin of our works of art — our creeds. 

Every day is revealing new facts bearing upon nature 
and human existence. 

Old thoughts must give way to the higher platform 
of thought which science is revealing to us. Creeds are 
creations of time and of designing and bigoted men. 

The past is strewn with the wrecks of creeds.. 

For a time, creeds answer a purpose, and are then 
exploded and swept away. 

The successive geological formations revealed life 
gradually assuming a higher type. 

Every day is now revealing new facts bearing upon 
the doctrine of the emanation and absorption of species. 

Evidence of the emanation of all forms of life, from 
our environments, from the lowest up to and including 
human, is pouring into the court of modern reason. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


89 


The ragged edge of life, as lived in the Liassic seas 
of England, is so sketched in nature that it is read and 
understood. 

The huge saurians, sixty feet long, with terrific jaws 
armed with terrible teeth, that swarmed in those seas, 
and are now fertilizing vast fields, are telling the history 
of the earlier forms of life. 

The present, with its teeming millions of varied life, 
is linked with that history, by chains that cannot be 
broken. 

That history, and modern revelations of science, are 
furnishing the foundation of new creeds, of a higher 
faith, and a clearer conception of the order and workings 
of the infinite. 







7 


90 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Metals OnGc Atoms in the Air. 


IT may sound strangely to unscientific ears to say, 
that all metals were once a mist of atoms in the air. 
Such, however, is the fact; and to-day metals are held in 
the sun’s air, and are shooting here and there in the form 
of light. 

An atom of burned iron, and two atoms of oxygen, 
combined, and in this form, fell to the earth, and, as 
water could not hold them, they sank through the seas 
to the seas’ bottom. 

They were thus diffused through the mud —the 
mud became rock, and the rock was lifted up and 
became dry land. 

Then it became subject to the action of the external 
elements, and was slowly disintegrated into soil, or 
ground into minute particles of moving glaciers. 

Atoms of metals* thus reduced into soil are diffused 
through the rocks, and the soil born of the rocks. 

From this soil weeds have sprung, and, when they 
were worthless for all things else, have been growing 
and decaying, and picking the particles of iron from 
their bed, and bringing atom to atom, and building them 
into ore, until a mountain such as the Iron Mountain of 
Missouri is formed. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


91 


On the 15th day of February, 1875, at ten o’clock 
at night, there appeared, one hundred and fifty miles 
above Iowa, a pear-shaped stone four thousand feet long, 
brilliant as the sun, and terrible to man and to beast as 
an army with banners. 

This was a meteoric stone, shooting athwart the sky 
with a speed of twenty-one miles a second, carrying in 
its train a streaming tress of very bright flame. 

It broke, and its fragments were scattered over a 
vast stretch of country. 

These fragments contained aggregated masses of 
iron. 

This meteor was a fragment of some dismantled 
world. 

In that world weeds grew, decayed, Were gathered 
into atoms of iron ore, as similar weeds grow, decay, 
and are gathered into atoms of iron ore to-day in this 
world of ours. 

By a similar process, first in the air, then in the 
sea, which holds immense stores of it, has silver been 
brought down and spread out under the sea. 

There it has consolidated, and appears at last as the 
rock-strata of a continent. 

The silver atoms, which a million generations of sea¬ 
weed and other forms of life had snatched from the 
ocean, lie diffused through the rocks until nature moulds 
them to new conditions. 

When the rocks are fissured and become permeable 
with water, the water picks up and bears along the silver 


92 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


grains that lie in its path, until they reach a fissure that 
opens upward, when, the water rising through the cleft, 
and losing its heat, loses its power to retain the metals, 
throws them down grain by grain along the walls of the 
rock, ready for the hand of man. 

Thus nature prepares for specie payment. 

Through ways that are dark and tricks that are 
strange, politicians can do no better. 



IDEAS may not be innate—probably are not. They 
are doubtless born of the fitness of our internal to our 
external conditions. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


93 


Political Parties. 


POLITICAL parties are begotten of the conditions 
of governments. 

They have their growth, their day, their maturity 
and decay. 

The end must come. 

To-day, the people of this country believe that the 
old party organizations have performed their mission, 
that they are passing away, and demand a new party. 

North and South, we have had enough of strife, 
enough of sectionalism, enough of the assertion of superi¬ 
ority of Northern over Southern, and Southern over 
Northern. 

Let us have peace from one end of the union to the 
other: a peace based upon a recognition of a union of 
interests, a union of aims, and a common country. 

Old parties have had their day. 

The new is demanded; a new made up of what is 
best of the old, North and South; a new that shall be 
brave, respectful and chivalrous towards all sections, all 
honest opinions, all public good, from the Lakes to the 
Gulf, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

Where shall we look for the elements of such a new 
party? 


94 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS, 


We answer, —they are ready, waiting the hand that 
may be duly authorized to organize, and mould, and give 
direction to them. 

These elements of a new party are not found in the 
prejudices, passions and vindictiveness of so-called 
“stalwart republicans,” whose bitterness and hate must, 
apparently, characterize them to the end of time. 

They cannot be invoked from the ranks of those 
who seem to believe that the only grand and logical act 
of their lives must be in continued justification of the 
“Lost Cause,” and expressions of undying hate towards 
those who defeated and overthrew that Cause. 

They cannot be found in a union of democrats South, 
who fought for what they believed to be right, with demo¬ 
crats North, who expressed sympathy with those of the 
South, yet stood passive spectators while the latter 
suffered defeat and overthrow. 

They cannot be found in a union of patriotic repub¬ 
licans north, who fought to maintain a union sacred as 
the sanctuary of our fathers, with the unprincipled 
republicans North and South, who have been such, that 
they may fatten on the spoils that are found in the wake 
of a cruel civil war. 

These are not the elements out of which to organize 
a new party. 

When a new party is born to the nation, it must be 
from the union of the better class of democrats of the 
South, and the better class of republicans of the North. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


95 


The better, and thinking class of democrats of the 
South, do not take kindly to the democrats of the Nbrth. 

The two elements are as unlike as grace and come¬ 
liness are unlike awkwardness and deformity. 

But the better Southerners do respect the better 
republican element of the North. 

They respect the fidelity of this element to its 
cause, its principles, and its country. 

They have become thoroughly satisfied, that the 
better republicans of the North represent, in a large 
degree, the best people of their section. 

These two great and influential elements, the better 
democrats of the South and North, and the best republi¬ 
cans North and South, stand ready and anxious for the 
formation of a new political party, a party whose name 
shall be the ‘‘Grand Union Party.” 

Why should not such a party be organized ? 

There is no living issue to prevent it. 

The time is ripe for it. 

The future of the country demands it. 

Let the better political elements, North and South, 
rally under the flag, and do it. 


96 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Belief in a God. 

LET ns believe in a God, as we may, and mnst. 

Let ns believe in an infinite God, a God infinite in 
spirit, and infinite in materiality. 

As infinite in spirit, pervading all tilings, without 
limit, and incomprehensible. 

As infinite in materiality, comprising all atoms, all 
worlds, all suns, and all systems, without bounds, 
immeasurable. 

A personality, in spirit and in matter, only as the 
infinite is a personality. 

A personality, only as that which has no beginning 
and no ending is a personality. 

A personality, only as that which has no center and 
no circumference is a personality. 

A personality of which there is no whole, no sum, 
that can neither be measured nor grasped, that cannot be 
represented by image, by picture, or by any conception 
of the mind. 

The proper idea of God is, that of the boundless, 
the eternal, the unmeasured and unmeasurable, in whom 
all things move and have their being; recognized by 
thought, by spirit, never comprehended, but forever 
incomprehensible to human understanding. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


97 


Christ was the Son of God, the son of the infinite, 
the father, if you please, as above set forth. He was 
thus one with the father, one with the infinite, as thus 
understood, and thus existing. 

Every man, woman and child that has existed, or 
will exist in the' future, has been, is, and must be, the 
son or daughter, the child of the infinite — one with the 
infinite. , 

Among those that have existed, do exist, and will 
exist in the infinite, have been, are, and will be, the 
Superior and Inferior. 

Christ was a superior being. No morals can exceed 
those taught by him. 

Buddah and Mohammed, Socrates and Plato, Luther 
and Calvin, Chalmers and Bacon, Parker and Beecher, 
all belong to the Superior of the sons of the infinite. 

Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Jefferson Davis, 
and Guiteau, are examples of the Inferior sons of the 
infinite. All emanate from, and become absorbed in, 
the infinite. 

Duty, morality, require us to strive to imitate the 
highest virtues found in the Superior of the sons of the 
infinite, and not the vices of the Inferior; to follow what¬ 
ever reason and intelligence find good in the infinite, and 
not the evil. 


98 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



THESE men have recently been engaged in a con¬ 
troversy respecting the Christian Religion, or what is 
called such. 

In speaking of these men, we call them gifted; but 
are they really gifted in their perceptions of facts or 
truths? 

It is said of the one, that as an infidel he assails 
Christianity; of the other, that as a Christian, he defends 
Christianity. 

Col. Ingersol does not assail Christianity. He does 
not seem to possess that apprehension of what Christ¬ 
ianity really is, which enables him to menace it with a 
blow. 

When, as is sometimes the case, he talks about love, 
liberty, and human equality, we are induced to think he 
has glimpses of what Christianity really is. 

His sentiments sometimes seem Christian in their 
utterance; yet, judging from the general purport of his 
talks and writings, we can but conclude that he has only 
a slight perception of the spiritual, the soul-reaching 
nature of Christianity’s self. 


* Judge Black has died since the above was written. 



THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


99 


Col. Ingersol does not assail Christianity. As well 
might a pigmy attempt to pull down the sun from his 
place in the heavens. He does assail the blind disregard 
of the facts and demonstrations of science, which Chris¬ 
tianity, so-called, indulges. 

He does assail the monstrous crimes and inconsis¬ 
tencies which have characterized its progress from the 
times of Moses and the prophets down to the present; 
but, in doing this, he does not reach Christianity’s self. 

He does not touch the infinite source or fountain of 
morality and Christianity, nor seem to get any real 
perception thereof. 

Judge Black does not defend Christianity. 

He does, however, seek to defend the very crimes 
and inconsistencies which Col. Ingersol assails. 

He is unable to defend Christianity, because he fails 
to see where it lies, or wherein its standard is found. 

Col. Ingersol assails Christianity, as the Bible claims 
to be its exponent and standard. 

Judge Black defends it upon precisely the same 
grounds. 

So long as Christianity depends upon the Bible, as a 
whole, for its standard and defense, so long will it seem 
to be a jumble of revolting inconsistencies, to be assailed 
by scoffers and the ignorant, and defended by the blind 
and bigoted. 

The Bible is an exponent of Christianity, only as it 
teaches us to do as we would be done by, and to love our 
neighbors as ourselves. 


100 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


When it teaches us an eye for an eye, and a tooth 
for a tooth, when it teaches us to justify human slavery 
and polygamy, it teaches us the opposite of Christianity, 
the negative of all moral good. 

The Bible is like whatever originates in and through 
humanity. It involves much that is good, with a vast 
amount of that which is absolutely evil. 

Pure Christianity has a higher birth than the Bible. 
Hence, those that assail it as though the Bible were its 
sole standard, fail of the mark; while those who defend 
it, with reference to that book as its sole and true stan¬ 
dard, show they fail fully to realize that of which they 
seek to be the champions. 

Before the Bible, Christianity was. 

Its residence is in, and with, the infinite. 

Its manifestations, wherever found, is love as opposed 
to hate, truth as opposed to falsehood, good as opposed 
to evil, the positive as opposed to the negative. 

As good and evil are included in the infinite, it is 
the service of the good as opposed to the evil, in accor¬ 
dance with the best of our perceptions, that constitutes 
true Christian action. 

The teachings of the Bible were doubtless the best 
standard of human action that its authors perceived or 
apprehended. Many of these teachings were, and are, 
sublime in their character, and constitute the very 
essence of Christianity. 

But this essence of Christianity constitutes but a 
small part of the degrading, disgusting, and filthy 
rubbish of the book. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


101 


As a standard of human action, it is inconsistent 
and abhorrent as a whole: and merits the ridicule, not 
only of Col. Ingersol, but of all truly enlightened and 
thinking people. 

Some of its writers have the right to be heard, and 
their teachings should be followed by mankind. 

No being ever lived on earth who illustrated the 
genuine spirit of Christianity in a higher degree, both 
by teaching and by practice, than the Man, Christ 
Jesus. 

Discussions like the one between Col. Ingersol and 
Judge Black are well enough in their way—they beget 
thought. 

It is through the exercise of thought, of reason, that 
we may reach the true, the pure, the sweet, the strong 
and the good. 

Through these only can we elevate ourselves morally 
and attain that supreme height where peace and happi¬ 
ness dwell. 

It is through the exercise of independent thought, 
of educated reason, that we may become able to separate 
the true from the false, Christianity from the crimes and 
monstrosities that have been associated with it. 

Bigotry and superstition have, in the past, sur¬ 
rounded it. 

The designing have'sought to clothe it with material 
forms and ceremonies until the unthinking fail to distin¬ 
guish its form or character. 

Let us learn to distinguish what Christianity really is. 


102 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


The wisdom of the wise may overlook it. 

The simplicity of a child can comprehend it. 

It is the embodiment of all goodness, and all that 
elevates the immortality of mankind, as opposed to all 
evil, and that which degrades and brutalizes humanity. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


103 


Selfishness Dishonest. 

IT is impossible that selfishness should reason 
rightly in any respect. Those who propose to be good, 
and to serve goodness with the hope of a reward here¬ 
after, must be blind in their estimation of the worthiness 
of all things. Selfishness overpowers the reason, or 
outcries it. It is a kind of sensuality that outgrows and 
chokes it. It does not stop to compare things together. 
It, therefore, is always unjust. It exaggerates all things. 
It begets cunning and deceit. It cheats its possessor, and 
those with whom he comes in contact. It volunteers to 
accept the untrue. 

Instead of being guided by selfishness, in our 
relations to the here, and to the hereafter, let us listen to 
the great reasoners, self-command, unagitated trust, 
deep-looking love, and rule ourselves from this high 
seat. 


104 


THOUGHT GERMS FOE THINKERS. 


/ 


INFINITY! To what can we liken it? As vast, 
rightly considered, it is not more wonderful, nor more 
“impressive, than that which we call littleness. Infinity 
is not mysterious, it is only unfathomable. It is not 
concealed, but incomprehensible. It is clear, but fathom¬ 
less as the pure, unsearchable sea. 

All expressions of the infinite sink into a second 
place as they affect our minds, when compared with the 
still, yet audible voice of the level twilight behind 
purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark, 
troublous-edged sea. 

The blue of the rainy sky, the many tints of morning 
flowers, the sunlight on summer foliage and fields, may 
be to us sources of more merely sensual pleasure than 
the streaks of wan and dying light, or the rich purple 
hue of morning. But it is from the latter that we get 
ojir most vivid ideas of the infinite. Here, in the dawn 
of the morning, and in the- shadows of evening, we find 
of all visible things, the least material, the least finite, 
the furthest withdrawn from any personality, or prison 
house, the most typical of the unbeginning and unending, 
the most suggestive picture of the glory of an infinite 
dwelling place. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


lOfi 


Bright distance, illuminated by the blending of all 
colors, having no limit, seems to open the prison house 
that lies about us, and fills us with a joy and apprehen¬ 
sion of the infinite, which the orbed spring and the 
whirling waves of the torrent fail to produce. 



LOYE may overlook slight faults. Wisdom may 
pass, unnoticed, minor errors; but Truth cannot overlook 
insult, and declines to endure a stain. 

The spirit, or lamp of Truth, should be clearly pos¬ 
sessed in the hearts of all men, of whatever calling in 
life. 

We may not always be able to command the good, 
or beautiful, but we can command honesty. 

Truth, honesty, disdains all that is false, all that is 
merely ornamental, and treats them as downright and 
inexorable lies. Why pretend to worth, where worth is 
not? Such pretension is an imposition, a vulgarity, an 
impertinence. Away with mere ornaments, and give us 
what everybody wants, integrity, Truth. 


8 



106 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



IS 



LIBERTY, to the luxurious, means license; to the 
reckless, it means change; to the rogue, it means rapine; 
to the fool, it means equality. By liberty, the proud 
mean anarchy, and the malignant, violence. 

How false are our conceptions of liberty! How 
treacherous is the phantom, how frantic our pursuit of 
that phantom! 

There is no such thing in the universe as liberty. 
There can never be. Neither the stars, the earth, nor the 
sea have it. Men have the mockery and semblance of it 
as a punishment. 

The only true liberty, what may be called such, is 
control of the passions, discipline of the intellect, sub¬ 
jection of the will, the fear of inflicting, and the shame of 
committing, a wrong. 

By liberty, we mean respect for all who are in 
authority; consideration for all who are in dependence; 
veneration for the good; mercy for the evil; sympathy 
with the weak. 

The only importance of laws is that they be good. 
If good, no matter whether they be new or old. 

Liberty means obedience to all good laws, and legiti¬ 
mate methods of reform for all bad ones. 

Liberty in this sense means perfect freedom. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


107 


idleness. 

LET us not be blind to the horror, distress, and 
tumult which oppress the world. 

Let us look, without attempting to screen our eyes, 
at the want among operatives; at the recklessness and vil¬ 
lainy in the leaders of revolt; at the absence of common 
moral principle in the upper classes; at the want of com¬ 
mon courage and honesty in the heads of governments ; 
at the recklessness of demagogues; at the immorality of 
the middle classes; at the effeminacy of those styled the 
nobility. 

Want, recklessness and villainy, absence of moral 
principle, want of courage .and honesty, immorality and 
effeminacy, rarely walk with industry, but are the hand 
in hand companions of that commonest of all calamities 
of households, states and nations,—Idleness. 


108 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


iducated fools. 

EDUCATED imbeciles are the worst of all imbe¬ 
ciles. 

We know them by their narrow sympathies and 
hardened hearts. 

The best hardly pleases them, and the brightest 
hardly entertains. 

Their education makes them proud, and the pleasure 
they take in anything is not in view of the worthiness 
of the thing, but in the degree in which it indicates 
some fancied greatness of their own. 

Education leads fools to prefer gracefulness of dress, 
manner and aspect, to value of substance and heart. 

They like a well said thing, better Jthan a true 
thing; prefer a well trained manner to a sincere one; 
think a delicately formed face better than a good natured 
one. 

Educated folly is ever setting custom and semblance 
above everlasting truth. It induces distinctions between 
class and class; it causes every one to be more or less 
despised who has no social rank; it has no interest in the 
grief of the poor and needy, but weeps with the cultured 
and well bred. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 109 

The educated fool is known by his having fastidious¬ 
ness without judgment, superciliousness of manner with¬ 
out dignity, refinement of habits without purity, grace 
of expression without sincerity, and a desire of loveli¬ 
ness without love. 

Thus we see a liberal education intensifies foolish¬ 
ness. 

We cannot manufacture diamonds from mud. 

No free-trade will ever lower the price of brains. 

There is no ophir of common sense that is made free 
by the schools and colleges. 


110 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS- 


Men’s Proper Business. 

THE proper business of men is: 

First, to know themselves and their surroundings 
intimately. 

Secondly, to be happy—happy in themselves and in 
their surroundings. 

Thirdly, to improve themselves, and to improve 
their surroundings so far as they may need improving. 

Such should be the business of men on earth. 

The real business of men appears to be, total igno¬ 
rance of themselves and their surroundings. 

To be miserable in themselves and in their sur¬ 
roundings. 

To let themselves and their surroundings severely 
alone so far as improvement is concerned. 

Men fear disagreeable facts, shrink from clearness of 
light, refuse to examine themselves, and seem to be in 
terror at all truth, and love glosses, veils and decorative 
lies of all sorts. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Ill 



TO be proud of birth, of place, of wit, of bodily 
beauty is not of itself harmful. 

A natural pride that is just, is eminently proper. 

But to be proud of our sanctities, to pour contempt 
upon our fellows, upon the touch-not-the-Lord’s-anointed 
principle, to make our ideas of our own worth the source 
of our complacency; to congratulate ourselves, day by 
day, on our purities, proprieties, elevations, and inspira¬ 
tions, this is the weakest, wickedest and most foolish 
form of human egotism. 

The school, and society, that wear their pieties for 
decoration as women wear their diamonds, flaunt phylac¬ 
teries between dust and the dew of heaven. 


112 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



EVERY mind has a power peculiar to itself. 

We find a wider range and grasp in one mind than 
in another; but by search we shall find something in the 
mind of limited range which is different from, and in its 
way, better than, anything presented to us by an intel¬ 
lect of broader range. 

Nightingales sing more melodiously than the larks ; 
but the larks sing in a way peculiarly their own, and, in 
its way, better than the nightingales can do. 

Each bears a part among the melodies of to-day, and 
each of these parts is equally essential in the rich har¬ 
monies of the infinite. 

A sentence is often as valuable as a volume. A note 
may be as sweet as a song. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


113 


the Inferior Man. 

THE inferior man thinks of himself before he thinks 
of his fellow. 

His mind is conversant with gain, rather than with 
honor. 

His progress is downward, rather than upward. 

Righteousness, devotion, humility, sincerity, are, to 
him, unknown quantities. 

Riches are his object, truth his by-word. 

He is good for no useful purpose. 

His faults he clings to as his real stock in trade, 
his capital. 

In introducing himself to the public, his only con¬ 
cern is to be known, and he never questions whether he 
is worthy to be known. 

The inferior man is full of suggestions of small 
shrewdness. 

If he manifests a desire to be magnanimous, it is 
that he.may the more surely circumvent you. 

He leaves the household of the widow and orphans 
empty. To him, honor and nobility of character k are 
weaknesses. 


114 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


superior 


THE superior man never acts contrary to his un¬ 
derstanding of what is virtue. 

In moments of haste he does not desert it. 

In seasons of danger he cleaves to it. 

To him, the present alone is real. Duty is com¬ 
manding now. 

Opportunity is the offer of to-day. 

He is not anxious to know the future, but seeks at 
once to plant his feet on eternal principles, to live in 
obedience to infinite laws. 

He knows that our life is made of imperishable 
qualities, and that we have an imperishable existence. 

To him, virtuous happiness now is the only guaran¬ 
tee of happiness at any other time. 

The superior man assails his own wickedness before 
that of others. 

He is grave, generous, sincere, earnest, and kind. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


115 


ireat Men. 

IT is said that great men never know how, or why, 
they do things; that they cannot comprehend the nature 
of rules, and therefore have no rules; that they do not 
usually know in what they do, what is best, or what is 
worst. What they say is, to them, all the same, some¬ 
thing they cannot help saying, or doing. To them, one 
of their productions is as good as another, and none of 
them are worth much. The man of rules, wherever you 
find him, may be known for a second-rate man. Eules 
relate to mathematics. A fool can become respectable 
there. But genius, the really great man, has no rules, 
no more than melody has. And it is better for him, and 
for us, that it is so. There are no precepts for the pro¬ 
duction of the great by great men, no more than there 
are for the production of the beautiful. The great man 
says: “I have done it, because it does well.” 

The great man lives in the present, for his own age, 
he sows now. The harvests from that sowing are gath¬ 
ered in other ages. His grasp is for the vital truth of 
the present. He levies tribute on every thing in the 
world he can set his eyes on. He deals with the present, 
plainly and truly. He shows the age itself; its virtues 
and its its vices, its wisdom and its folly. 

The great man cannot help being great. He cannot 
copy. He is a rule unto himself. He is an expression 
of the unruled. 


116 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Imagination. 

IMAGINATION is the penetrating, possession-tak¬ 
ing faculty in man. 

It is his highest intellectual power. It does not 
reason, it works by no Binomial theorem, by no integral 
calculus. 

It is a piercing mind’s tongue, that tastes of the very 
heart of the matter submitted to it. 

Substance, and spirit, it alike penetrates. That 
which has neither life nor spirit it lays bare. 

The counterfeit of truth and principle it at once 
detects. 

It whispers into men’s ears, and elevates them into 
the regions o^ the infinite and eternal. 

The sealed thoughts of the centuries it unseals, and 
brings them down to the habitations of men. 

It opens out thoughts from the heart, that find their 
way down into the heart. 

It leads us from the centre far out amidst the limitless. 

Its treasures are inexhaustible. 

It is the invisible gateway of the future. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


117 


greatness. 

GREATNESS is not a teachable, nor gainable, 
thing. 

There is an everlasting difference set between one 
man’s capacity and another’s. 

It is priceless at all times alike. 

It can not be manufactured or communicated. 

You can never multiply its quantity, nor speculate 
in its value. 

Some men may better try to discover it, than attain 
to it; learn to know gold from iron, diamonds from flint- 
sand, rather than to make diamonds out of their own 
charcoal. 

Greatness is the true inspiration. 

Greatness pierces deepest, and holds securest. 

It is filled with the most intense passions, the sweet¬ 
est gentleness, and the deepest sympathy. 

Great men are void of egotism and selfish care, are 
regardful of the welfare of others, and constant in that 
regard. 

Greatness teaches us to forget ourselves, and to enter 
like possessing spirits into the minds of those about us. 


118 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


fenciration. 

PENETBATION is the discovering of truth. 

It has no respect for mere sayings or opinions. It 
is restless and tormented unless it find truly. 

It is not affected by praise or blame; its sense is too 
acute for this. It is pleased with sympathy, but can do 
without it. 

It is regardless of opinions, not in pride, but be¬ 
cause it has no vanity. 

It is cautious of its object and aim, and its lines are 
direct. 

It longs to do and invent more and more, without 
seeking to secure the sweetness of praise. It goes 
straight forward, up and upwards. 

No mutterings can turn it back; no voices divert it 
from its purpose. Penetration is a pilgrim on the earth, 
healthy and exulting in the fields of nature. 

It is ever thirsting for new knowledge, and its home 
is in the infinite. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


119 



THE test of a truly great man is his humility. Xot 
that he should doubt his own power, or hesitate to speak 
his opinions. 

He has a right to understand what he can do and 
say, and what the world is saying and doing. 

He properly knows his own business, and knows 
that he knows it. 

He is conscious of holding opinions, and usually 
knows his opinions are right; but he does not think 
any more of himself on that account. 

He does not expect his fellow man to fall down and 
worship him. 

He has a curious undersense of weakness, of power¬ 
lessness. 

He feels that greatness is not sa much in himself as 
through himself. 

He does not feel that he is anything else but an 
emanation from the infinite. 

He does not talk about the dignity of this or that. 

He works, feeling that he cannot well help it. 

His story must be told; the effect must be witnessed. 


120 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


If the effect is good, well and good; if not, the world 
will not be much the worse. 

Jealousy and self-complacency are unknown to him. 

His intellect is not of that subordinate character 
that can entertain these. 

Affectation, assumption of manner in behavior or 
work,. does not attract him. 

His feelings are natural, never exaggerated. 

Tricks, wherever witnessed, are his abhorrence. 

Whatever he does is good and great, without re¬ 
ference to the cost. 

He knows the greatest thing a human soul can do, is 
to see, and to see plainly. 

He knows that thinking is better than talking; that 
to see clearly is to bring past, present and future before 
the mind at once. 

The man of humility is a man of power, yet wears 
loving, laughing glances for all. 

He believes in the full enjoyment of eye and heart. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


121 


Metaphysicians. 

ABE not metaphysicians, on the whole, the greatest 
trouble the w^orld has got to deal with ? 

A tyrant, or bad man, may be of some use, by teach¬ 
ing people what must be learned by the opposite, the 
negative. 

The idle man is only harmful in setting an idle 
example, and teaching others his lazy misunderstandings. 

But metaphysicians are always entangling the good 
and the active. 

Their business seems to be to weave cobwebs among 
the fine wheels of the world's business and progress. 

They are spiders that endeavor to work into the 
warp and woof of other men’s lives, impediments and 
conundrums, that involve in darkness, and seldom impart 
aid or light. 

Without them, the bulk of modern pretenders would 
be amazingly diminished. 

Take them away from our literature, and the better 
will remain, and the straw stuffing will have disappeared. 

True metaphysicians are those only, who have learn¬ 
ed the use of hands, eyes, and feet. 


122 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Matters of light 

WHAT we see affecting human life is love, courage, 
and destiny. 

All else is matter of faith. 

Whatever we look for beyond these, is misty in out¬ 
line. 

When love is laid in the coffin; when courage has 
no more to defend; when the fingers relax and destiny is 
sealing the scroll; then tears fall upon the scene, the 
light burns dim, and the end, which is but a new begin¬ 
ning, is at hand. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


123 



THERE should be no writers but the best. 

The second rate should never be allowed to trouble 
mankind. 

We have not time to read the best, therefore should 
not be encumbered with inferior work. 

Let psuedo-writers make no apologies, by hoping 
there is some good in what they have written. 

If what they have written is not of the best, away 
with it. 

Do not let them trouble us now, if they ever hope 
to do better. 

Let them destroy what they have done, and wait for 
better days. 

Men of sense know better than to waste their time. 

They know the master genius too well to attempt 
to beguile the public after him. 

Inferior writers are an injury to the good, and to all 
who read. 

Good thoughts, in their hands, become blunders. 

Bright truths, under their setting, become weariness. 

All thoughts of ordinary men have already been 
expressed by great men in the best possible way. 

The majority of our writers should study the best 
words, rather than try to invent poor ones. 


124 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


the Supernatural. 

LET us conceive, if we can, a spirit, something 
without limbs, thinner than air, more subtle than a 
perfect vacuum, yet talking, pursuing, going journeys, 
capable of occupying place invisibly, a shadow that does 
not cast a shadow, a traceless presence, wearing a 
traceless plume, along a traceless track; a something 
crowned with a resistless radiance, without lines or 
strength; without features, yet wearing an expression of 
the unreal; full of love or of hate, dust and power 
beneath, unknown truth around, and measureless depths 
above. 

The spirit sphere embraces all spheres; it has no 
order or conception; the blue dome and all fields are 
alike to it; it is begotten of the matarial byain; dies 
when the brain dies; has only such an eternal day as the 
brain in which it dwells has. 

The supernatural is a dream, a phantasmagoria, a 
baseless fabric, an absurdity, an impossibility, a weak 
brain’s delusion. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


125 


looks. 

THEEE are salt swamps of literature, and lovely 
islands of sweet sunshine, with springs and lakes in 
them, pure and good. 

All minds do not read the same books, yet there are 
some books which all should read. 

Magazines and review^ waste the time, and mislead 
the mind. 

When we dislike a book we should seek another. 

Study the tone of a book. 

A book that sneers, or asserts haughtily, is poison¬ 
ous. 

The book that leads to reverence of something, may 
command the heart, as more likely to be noble and pure. 

Never read a book that sneers at sentiment. 

Sentiment and sense make up the human character. 

A human book will always repudiate sin. 

A vile one glosses sin, and often seeks to make it 
appear righteousness, or right. 

For serious reading, take logic, poetry, history, and 
natural history. 


126 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Fiction and the drama do not promote health of mind 
in the young. 

Give us books that inspire a quiet, domestic feeling. 

Sickly and useless, shallow and verbose books, cast 
aside. 

Byron may be read when tastes are fully formed, and 
magnificence can be distinguished from wrong. 

Never write poetry, and never read bad or common 
poetry. 

There is too much of bad prose and bad poetry in the 
world already. Read no author that offends you. 

The object of reading is gratification and improve¬ 
ment; what offends in literature can neither gratify nor 
improve. 

Some books may be read for amusement, some for 
the pleasant people into whose company they introduce 
you, some for the real wisdom they impart. 

Some common books may amuse, but a noble book 
only will give you dear friends. Books should be not 
only clever, but right; not drily instructive, but sugges¬ 
tive of what is just and generous. 

Witty books are not often restful or healthful; and 
the safest are those of a reverent nature. 

The best book is the one that makes you content in 
quiet virtue. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


127 


UngGntlemanliness. 

BECAUSE a man is a tradesman, or a mechanic, 
is not necessarily a sign of inferiority. 

A mechanic ought to be, and often is, more of a gen¬ 
tleman than idle, pretentious, and useless people. 

It is the doing of noble work, that makes the noble 
man in a trade or profession. 

It is the noble work only that advances us in arts, 
commerce, and civilization. 

Every man that would be honored, should use the 
talents entrusted to him. 

Unprofitable servants must stand upon the ground 
of their own choosing. 

Wit and intellect, used for the highest and best pur¬ 
poses, whether to guide a plow, turn a wheel, or frame 
laws for the good of a people, is sure to win influence in 
high quarters. 

Gentlemanliness of this sort is gentlemanliness the 
world over. 

Wit, talents, used for the harm of our fellow men, 
are the manifestations of ungentlemanliness. 

Mere money is vulgar. 

Wit, coupled with gentility and virtue, are the stand¬ 
ards of worth, wherever found. 


128 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Enjoyments. 

HOESE-RACING and hunting, night and day 
assemblies, costly and wearisome music, handsome 
dresses, chagrined and weary contention for place, 
power, or wealth, are not enjoyments; and, until we 
learn this, we have but little valuable to impart, even to 
the heathen. 

Take your savages, put them in tight shoes, dress 
them, feed them with white bread, teach them how to 
waltz gracefully, to wear the airs of civilization, to 
renounce cannibalism, and their women to live and tor¬ 
ment husbands, rather than be bound and buried with 
them; and the question remains—is this enjoyment? 

Is there any royal road to enjoyment? Indeed, is 
there any royal road to anything, or to anywhere, worth 
going to? 

There are precious things in the world. Sun, and 
air, and life itself, at all times. Wine and milk at oc¬ 
casional times. 

But, if we would enjoy strength, we must work. 

If we would be fed, we must dig. 

If we would be happy, we must be kind. 

If we would gain wisdom, we must look and think. 

Riding at a hundred miles an hour, making stuffs at 
a thousand yards a minute, will not of themselves make 
us stronger, wiser, or happier. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


129 


There has always been more in the world than men 
could see and enjoy by going slowly. 

They may see less, and enjoy less, by going fast. 

Inventions for conquering space and time, in reality 
conquer nothing. 

Space and time need no conquering. 

We are at liberty to use them. 

A fool will shorten them. 

A wise man will lengthen both. 

Kill space and time and we kill all a man hath. 

The man of enjoyment seeks to gain and animate 
them. 

A railroad is a device for making the world smaller. 

The man who enjoys the world would make it larger. 

It does a bullet no good to go fast, and a man no harm 
to go slow. 

The glory is not in going, but in being. 

We may talk by telegraph from place to place, but 
talk, with nothing to say, is valueless. 

Thought and sight are the precious things, not pace. 

Railroads and telegraphs, it is said, are useful for the 
civilizing of savage nations. 

But what if we have no civilization to give them! 

Shall we send them gunpowder and lead ? 

Is this then the enjoyment we confer and the delight 
we receive ? 


130 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Do we desire to communicate religion and science? 

This work has not usually been done at a faster than 
a foot pace. 

Had w T e been intent on communicating these, we 
could have done more in 1,800 years without steam and 
telegraph than has been accomplished. 

Follow out the question in what consists our enjoy¬ 
ments ? 

Thinking from point to point, and we shall find, that 
all true happiness, nobleness and enjoyment are near us. 

Near and neglected. 

All wholesome and noble enjoyments are possible for 
us to day, and have been since first we emenated from 
our surrounding. We can see corn grow, buds blossom, 
we can read, think, love and hope. 

We have always the power to do these things, and 
we shall never have power to do more. 

Our enjoyments must depend upon our knowing and 
teaching these few things. 

When we discover this we shall have made the right 
discovery. 

We may fight, preach, fast, buy, sell, indulge in 
pomp, or reside with parsimony, may exult in pride, or 
bow in pretended humility, but the true kingdom of the 
world maybe found in a furrow or two of garden ground. 

The clouds and the firmament furnish a truly infi¬ 
nite dominion for our enjoyment 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


131 



IT is difficult to lie wisely charitable. 

We are in doubt how to do good without multiply¬ 
ing the sources of evil. 

To give alms is nothing unless we give thought. 

When we feed the poor, we should consider the poor. 

Money may be of value to the needy, but thought and 
kindness are often of more value. 

There is a grave responsibility in spending money on 
others. 

Kindly thought embodied in action, must assuredly 
aid in all our social life. 

Charity should be exercised not only to the poor, but 
towards all men. 

Towards fools, as well as towards the wise. 

All were born for some good purpose. 

None to be trod upon and starved. 

Fools were born that wise people may take care of 
• them. 

Wise people were born that they may be disciplined 
by fools. 


132 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


These are the relations of the wise and foolish. 

The strong is not given strength that he may crush 
the weak, but that he may support him. 

The plain fact is, the strong and wise are made for 
the use of the weak and foolish. 

Charity says, give of your strength. 

Charity says, crush not the weak. 

Charity says, support and guide all who need support 
and guidance. 

Parents are the support and guide of childhood; out 
of the household they should support the weak and poor. 

This is the especial duty of those possessed of wealth. 

Not only the meritoriously weak and poor should be 
aided and lifted up, but the guilty and punishably poor ; 
those who know better ; those who ought to be ashamed 
of themselves. 

We may give a pension to a widow who has lost her 
son, food and medicine to the workman who has broken 
an arm, nursing to the patient wasting with sickness. 

These are nothing. 

But the thought that wars with the waywardness of 
mankind; that holds to the erring until he is made uner¬ 
ring, that directs the lost to opportunities and enjoy¬ 
ments. 

This is much. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


133 


truth and terror. 


LET ns not make any general assertion against the 
pomp, the splendor of dress, and the costly accessories of 
life. 

We are not apt to attach too much importance to 
the beautiful in dress, or its influence upon taste and 
character. 

But we may say that as long as there is cold and 
nakedness in the land around us, there is no question at 
all but that splendor of dress is a crime. 

So long as people have no blankets for their beds 
and no clothing for their bodies, so long we should provide 
blankets for them instead of providing ourselves with 
laces and jewelry. 

So long as the unsheltered and outcast die in hovel 
and shed, those who sit in placid luxuriance are in part¬ 
nership with death. 

They are dressed in his spoils. 

So long as innocent children starve for want of bread, 
so long as mothers pray for food and raiment which they 
have not, so long are the flowers and wreaths that crown 
fair heads, trimmed with the grass that grows on graves. 


134 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 



SIMPLICITY of manners, combined with sensibility 
and imagination constitute the ideal of human character. 

We often, however, mistake ignorance for simplicity, 
and sensuality for refinement. 

Pride is usually at the bottom of this great mistake. 

Other passions do occasional good, but where pride 
f uts in its work, wrong follows. 

We may do many things quietly and innocently which 
are dangerous done proudly. 

Those who care not for gardens and libraries, but 
care for nothing but money, include none but ignoble 
persons. 

Xoble people care nothing for money or mere luxu¬ 
ries, only as they enable them to possess gardens, libraries 
and works of art. 

What gives intellectual and emotional enjoyment; 
what supplies new pleasures and new powers of giving 
pleasure to others, is the desire of the truly noble. 

The man that is proud of mere money or station, or 
style, or any of the luxuries that money brings, is vulgar 
and ignoble. 

But money, station, the beautiful, in whatever rela¬ 
tion it may be found, when accepted in kindness become 
elements of pleasure, elevate the character of the indi¬ 
vidual, not so much in view of what he has, as in his per¬ 
ceptions of the infinitely more, which he cannot know. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


135 


iride. 

WE often think that to love light and seek know¬ 
ledge must always be right. 

This is a grave mistake. 

If the love of light, or the seeking of knowledge is 
begotten of pride, both may be illy pursued. 

Light and knowledge are good. Yet men perish in 
seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light. 

Mystery is sometimes needful for us and should be 
accepted. In refusing to accept it we may perish. 

The richest knowledge is in realizing that there is 
infinitely more which we cannot know. 

The greatest light we can enjoy is the conciousness 
that there are treasures of light inexhaustable pervading 
the measurless depths around us. 

None but a proud and weak man mourns that there 
is more for him to know if he chooses. 

A just pride is willing to work on, feeling that the 
journey is endless, and the treasures to be attained inex¬ 
haustable. 

There is a cloud ever marching before humanity with 
its summit] ess pillar. 

For all time and for the length of eternity, the mys¬ 
teries of infinity open further and further. 


136 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Happiness ip Work. 

THAT we may be happy in work three things are 
needed: first, we must be fit for the work we undertake; 
second, we must not do too much of it; and third, we 
must experience a sense of success in the work. 

To be happy in work then, we should first find out 
what we are fit for. 

Second, how much of the work we are fitted to do, 
we can do without weariness. 

Third, a thorough appreciation of the success attend¬ 
ing our efforts. 

Every man of ordinary intelligence is fit for some¬ 
thing. 

If he strikes too high he must inevitably come down 
to his own proper level. 

Should he begin at the bottom he will build up by 
degrees, until he reaches his proper place and sphere of 
action. 

There is a kind of humility that men feel in at once 
taking their proper place in the affairs of the world. 

They feel the contumely of humble employments, 
and think it a veritable shame to be anything less than 
the gifted and great. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


137 


Out of this grows the thought that there is something 
wrong in the foundations of society that prevents them 
reaching all they imagine respecting themselves. 

They have a panic horror of living a ledge or two* 
lower on this molehill of the world than some other one 
lives. That it is a calamity to which they were not born y 
and seek at any costs to avert what is inevitable. 

What we need just here is to learn that our common¬ 
est trades are honorable, that it is possible for a man to 
retain his dignity, and the loftiest manhood, and yet be 
every day a part of his time occupied in manual labor. 

Courage, courtesy, gravity, sympathy with the feel¬ 
ings of others, truth, purity, and all that goes to make up 
the character of a true gentleman should be found behind a 
counter, or at the work bench, as well as in the higher 
walks of literature, or among legislators and statesmen. 

Wherever the qualities mentioned are hoped for and 
demanded, there they will in time surely be found. 

We seek to excuse ourselves for overwork, on the 
ground that it is necessary that we may live. 

This necessity, however, we find is more a fiction than 

fact. 

The true reason of this overwork is the ambitious 
desire of doing great things, and of accomplishing them 
by immense efforts. 

Such efforts are usually vain and pernicious. 

Great intellectual things are not done by great effort. 

1(J 


138 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Great men do great tilings without effort. 

Let us endeavor to understand this. 

The bodies work, and the head’s work should be done 
quietly, deliberately, and comparatively without effort; 
neither limbs nor brain should ever be strained to their 
utmost; no great work can thus be got out of them. 

Tranquility and courtesy are the characteristics of 
the really great and successful man, no matter what his 
field of labor may be. 

If a great thing can be done at all it can be done easi¬ 
ly, no matter if there be but one man in the world that 
can do it. 

If a man be a great man, he will do great things ; if 
a puny man, puny things. 

Whatever the great or small man may do, it is good 
and right if done happily and peacefully, if done ambi¬ 
tiously and impatiently, the achievement will be false, 
hollow and despicable. 

That a man may possess a sense of success in his work, 
it is necessary that he should comprehend it thoroughly, 
and thus be a good judge of it. 

He should never be dependent on popular opinion 
of what he does, or his manner of doing it. 

A victory gained, that is approved by the victors’ 
own judgment, is the true victory. 

A conciousness of what he has achieved, is a nobler 
experience, than receiving the plaudits of the unthinking 
millions. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


139 


How few know the real nourishment of such a feel¬ 
ing as this. 

Conceit puffs men up, but never props them up. 

True faith in one’s self needs not the aid of conceit to 
support it. 

Trying to be gifted, without the consciousness of 
possessing gifts, places a man in a condition of hopeless 
distress, and he lives in an utterly false state of mind 
and action. 

Originality, dexterity, invention, imagination, cannot 
be had merely for the asking. 

But honesty and sound work can be indulged by all 
men, and when indulged, the same brings genuine happi¬ 


ness. 


140 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Patriotism. 

HOW often, as well meaning people, we deceive our¬ 
selves, by indulging in the notion that patriotism requires 
us to limit our efforts to the good of our own country. 

Charity is no geographical virtue. 

What is grand and noble; what is charitable, holy 
and righteous on this side the Atlantic, is the same on 
the other side. 

What is improper here, is improper there. 

It would be well for saints and sinners to remember 
that neighbors at Jerusalem should be neighbors at 
Jericho. 

We should be ready to shake hands in the spirit of 
fellowship with any nation, arcoss any river or water, 
across any plain or over any mountain. 

Our clergymen often preach to us of patriotism and 
good works. 

Would it not be well for them to explain more 
clearly what patiotism and good works mean ? 

Whatever is good in the Bible, or in the world, was 
never written, and never provided for any particular 
church, people or nation. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


141 


The good we have is not ours to be proud of, to 
keep at home, to increase as though it were ours exclus¬ 
ively. 

We are not authorized to set ourselves so high, as to 
refuse to share the good we have with others. 

We should be ready at all times to rise and give of 
our substance to the household of the world. 

To day, the existing races of mankind occupy a 
higher platform than any that has preceded them. 

We have learned how to go, to speak. 

Let us now learn how to think and act rightly. 

Let the divisions of disciple and adversary be wiped 

out. 

Let us practice a virtue and patriotism comprehend¬ 
ing the length and breadth of the world. 

Let the nations learn to dwell in a community of 
fortitude, equity, patriotism and wisdom. 


142 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


Heroes, Inventors. 

WE are piling up light and worthless memorials of 
heroes, falsely so called, while the works and names of 
the world’s benefactors, the inventors and the mechanics, 
are buried beneath the waves of oblivion. 

History has become polluted and tainted with des¬ 
criptions of men, who, without having added an atom to 
the wealth, or to the happiness of society, have been per¬ 
mitted to riot on the fruits of other men’s labors; to wade 
in the blood of their species, and to be heralded as the 
honorable of the earth. 

These monsters are held up even by some Christians, 
to the admiration of the world, and as examples for our 
children. \ 

Is it not about time that the science and civilization 
of which we now so frequently boast, should diminish 
the vulgar admiration of the pests and scourages of the 
human race, called heroes, and military conquerors, and 
advance and facilitate the peaceful intercourse of the 
most remote countries with each other, and thereby in¬ 
crease the general stock of knowledge and happiness 
among mankind % 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


143 


Is it not about time that narrations of political con¬ 
vulsions, recitals of battles, and of honors conferred on 
statesmen and heroes, while dripping with human gore, 
should be left unnoticed, or be read with horror and dis¬ 
gust, and discoveries in science and descriptions of the 
works and inventions of our mechanics be sought and 
studied by all % 

The knowledge of those to whom the world is under 
the highest obligations has perished forever, for the rea¬ 
son that when History took her station in the temple of 
science, her professors deemed ' it beneath her dignity to 
record the actions and lives of men who were inventors 
of machines and improvers of the useful arts. 

To-day Scholars mourn, and the Antiquary weeps 
over the wreck that History has thus made of ancient 
learning and art. 

In vain the mechanic inquires for the processes by 
which his predecessors worked the hardest granite with¬ 
out iron, transported it in masses that astound us, and 
used them in the erection of stupendous buildings, appar¬ 
ently with the facility that modern workmen lay brick. 

The mechanic who made the chair in which Xerxes 
sat when he reviewed his mighty host, or witnessed the 
sea fight at Salamis, was a more useful member of society 
than the great king. 

It is more virtuous, more praiseworthy, to alleviate 
human sufferings than to cause or increase them. 

The old mechanician, who, when Marcus Servius lost 
his hand in the Punic war, furnished him with an iron 


144 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


one, was an incomparably better man than any mere war¬ 
rior. 

Had we a narrative of all the circumstances which 
led to the invention of the Lever , the Screw, the Wedge, 
Fully , Wheel and Axle, with what intense interest it would 
be perused by mechanics, and by scientific men in mod¬ 
ern times! 

What delights it would impart to every inquiring, 
intelligent mind. 

Such a narrative would convince us that the mechan¬ 
ics, the inventors of these devices, were the true Heroes of 
old, the genuine benefactors of their species, whose labors 
were for the benefit of all ages and all people. 

It is the names of such men and an account of whose 
lives, should have occupied the pages of history. 

It is the names and History of the heroes who have 
recently given us the printing press, the steam engine, 
the telegraph, and the telephone, that should be embalm¬ 
ed in everlasting remembrance, rather than the names and 
history of the mere politicians and soldier heroes of our 
age. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


145 


National fride. 


BITTER feelings are frequently displayed by citizens 
of different countries respecting claims to their inven¬ 
tions. 

Passions and prejudices are thus born, and bitter 
feelings engendered, that philosophers would eradicate, 
and wise men refuse to cherish. 

Churches may boast of their creeds, and national 
vauntings embodied in party platforms may contribute 
to the capital of politicians; but they find no place in the 
heart of the open minded searcher after truth. 

Philosophy contemplates mankind as one family, and 
recognizes no sectional or sectarian boasting. 

Neither science nor the arts are confined to degrees 
of longitude, nor are the thoughts of genius to be measur¬ 
ed by degrees from the equator north or south. 

Science, letters, and the arts should know no geo¬ 
graphical, no national distinction. 

Students of these should belong to the world. 


146 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


ftlG Science of lolitics. 

A glance at the present state of the world, would in¬ 
dicate that there is no such science as Politics. 

Our system of education seems to despise politics. 

The science of the relations and duties of men to each 
other is as yet in its infancy. 

And yet the importance of this science cannot be 
over-estimated. 

In its full sense, it implies the knowledge of the oper¬ 
ations of the virtues and vices o/ men upon themselves 
and society; the understanding of the ranks and offices of 
their intellectual and bodily powers in their various 
adaptations to art, science, and industry ; the understand¬ 
ing of the proper offices of art, science and labor them¬ 
selves ; a profound knowledge of jurisprudence, and broad 
principles of commerce. 

All this should be coupled with a practical knowledge 
of the present state and wants of mankind; and the best 
methods of reforming existing evils, and supplying our 
daily wants. 

It is not expected that all this should at once be taught 
to mere schoolboys. 

But the first elements of it should be taught, not only 
to every schoolboy, but to every one who is, or expects 
to become, a voter in the land. 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


147 


Our present systems of education fail to teach us 
what is most important. 

A true education, will teach us the impossibility of 
equality among men, and the good which arises from their 
inequality. 

It will teach us the compensating circumstances in 
different states and fortunes. 

Our children should learn the honorableness of every 
man who is worthily filling his appointed place in soci¬ 
ety, however humble. 

They should be learning the proper relations of rich 
and poor, governor and governed. 

They should learn the nature of wealth, and its mode 
of circulation; the difference between productive and 
unproductive labor; the relation of the products of mind 
and hand; the value of works of art and the possibilities 
relating to their production. 

It is yet important,, that we all learn the meaning of 
“Civilization,” its advantages and dangers. 

It would be well for us to study the meaning of the 
word “ Refinementand the possibility of possessing 
refinement in a low station, and losing it in a high one. 

Above all, weshould in our system of education, study 
the significance of every act of man’s daily life in its ulti¬ 
mate operation upon himself and others. 

When we include in our education such teachings as 
these, political demagogues, licentious statesmen, and pub¬ 
lic plunderers will be as impossible as a new version of 
the multiplication table. 


148 


THOUGHT GERMS FOR THINKERS. 


lot igotism. 

IN the very lap of the infinite, surrounded by, and 
mingling with, the elements of all souls and all things, 
let us find our conscious dwelling place; and finding it 
may we be possessed of so lofty a spirit of sweet content, 
as to enable us to pity all who cannot rise to know this 
happiness. 


ludicriGCS. 

ENORMOUS audiences await some writers; but 
such audiences are not apt to be select, and furnish no 
assurance that the writers whom they read, tower as mas¬ 
ter spirits over the ages and the nations ; and it is these 
master spirits only who cultivate and interest us. 

Of these we can never read too much. 


THE END. . 















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